Sound change
A sound change in historical linguistics is a change in the pronunciation of a language.
Sound variations include replacing one sound (or, more generally, one sound feature
value) with another (called a sound change), or more generally modifying an existing
sound. (phonological changes) may be included. Combining two sounds or creating a
new sound. Modifying sounds allows you to remove affected sounds or add new ones. If
changes occur only in some sound environments but not in others, the change in sound
may be orchestrated by the environment. The term "sound change" refers to diachronic
changes that occur in the phonetic system of a language. Alternating, on the other hand,
refers to changes that occur synchronously (in response to adjacent sounds within an
individual speaker's language) and do not alter the underlying system of the language
(e.g., the English The plural -s is pronounced differently depending on the sound that
precedes it, such as bet[s], bed[z], which is an alternating form rather than a change in
sound).
"Variation of sound" may refer to changes introduced historically (e.g. post-vocal /k/ in
Tuscan dialect, once [k ], but now [h] di ) [h]arlo, alternating with [k] in other positions:
con [k]arlo 'with Carlo'), whose labels are inherently inaccurate, It should be clarified
that in many cases it refers to a change or rearrangement of phonemes. Studies on
sound changes are usually done under the working assumption that sound changes are
regular. That is, we would expect the sound change to be applied mechanically
whenever that structural condition is met, irrespective of non-phonological factors such
as the meaning of the words affected. Obvious exceptions to the regular variation may
arise due to dialectal borrowing, grammatical similarities, or other known or unknown
causes, and some variations are described as 'sporadic' and thus not an apparent
regularity. It has no gender and only affects one or a few specific words. Nineteenth-
century Neogrammarian linguists introduced the term sound law to refer to rules of
periodic change, perhaps mimicking the laws of physics. Also, the term "law" is still used
to refer to a particular sound rule named after its author.
Grimm's Law, Grassmann's Law, etc. Exceptions are often allowed in real-world sound
variations, but expecting that regularity, or lack of exceptions, is much more likely than
historical linguists can define the concept of regular correspondence by means of
comparative law. is of great heuristic value. Each sound variation is restricted in space
and time, so it works in a limited region (within a particular dialect) and for a limited
period of time. For these and other reasons, the term "law of sound" has been criticized
for implying an unrealistic universality in sound variation. Any change in sound that
affects the phonological system, or the number or distribution of its phonemes, is a
phonological change.
Types of Language Change
Language is always changing. We’ve seen that language changes across space and
across social group. Language also varies across time.
Generation by generation, pronunciations evolve, new words are borrowed or invented,
the meaning of old words drifts, morphology develops or decays, and syntactic
stuctures and ordering constraints evolve as well. The rate of change varies, but
whether the changes are faster or slower, they build up until the “mother tongue”
becomes arbitrarily distant and different. After a thousand years, the original and new
languages will not be mutually intelligible. After ten thousand years, the relationship will
be essentially indistinguishable from chance relationships between historically unrelated
languages.
In isolated subpopulations speaking the same language, most changes will not be
shared. As a result, such subgroups will drift apart linguistically, and eventually will not
be able to understand one another.
In the modern world, language change is often socially problematic. Long before
divergent dialects lose mutual intelligibility completely, they begin to show difficulties and
inefficiencies in communication, especially under noisy or stressful conditions. Also, as
people observe language change, they usually react negatively, feeling that the
language has “gone down hill”. You never seem to hear older people commenting that
the language of their children or grandchildren’s generation has improved compared to
the language of their own youth.
Here Is a puzzle: language change is functionally disadvantageous, in that it hinders
communication, and it is also negatively evaluated by socially dominant groups.
Nevertheless is a universal fact of human history.
How and why does language change?
There are many different routes to language change. Changes can take originate in
language learning, or through language contact, social differentiation, and natural
processes in usage.
Language learning: Language is transformed as it is transmitted from one generation to
the next. Each individual must re-create a grammar and lexicon based on input received
from parents, older siblings and other members of the speech community. The
experience of each individual is different, and the process of linguistic replication is
imperfect, so that the result is variable across individuals. However, a bias in the
learning process – for instance, towards regularization – will cause systematic drift,
generation by generation. In addition, random differences may spread and become
‘fixed’, especially in small populations.
Language contact: Migration, conquest and trade bring speakers of one language into
contact with speakers of another language. Some individuals will become fully bilingual
as children, while others learn a second language more or less well as adults. In such
contact situations, languages often borrow words, sounds, constructions and so on.
Social differentiation. Social groups adopt distinctive norms of dress, adornment,
gesture and so forth; language is part of the package. Linguistic distinctiveness can be
achieved through vocabulary (slang or jargon), pronunciation (usually via exaggeration
of some variants already available in the environment), morphological processes,
syntactic constructions, and so on.
Natural processes in usage. Rapid or casual speech naturally produces processes such
as assimilation, dissimilation, syncope and apocopate. Through repetition, particular
cases may become conventionalized, and therefore produced even in slower or more
careful speech. Word meaning change in a similar way, through conventionalization of
processes like metaphor and metonymy.
Some linguists distinguish between internal and external sources of language change,
with “internal” sources of change being those that occur within a single languistic
community, and contact phenomena being the main examples of an external source of
change.
The analogy with evolution via natural selection
Darwin himself, in developing the concept of evolution of species via natural selection,
made an analogy to the evolution of languages. For the analogy to hold, we need a pool
of individuals with variable traits, a process of replication creating new individuals whose
traits depend on those of their “parents”, and a set of environmental processes that
result in differential success in replication for different traits.
We can cast each of the just-listed types of language change in such a framework. For
example, in child language acquisition, different grammatical or different lexical patterns
may be more or less easily learnable, resulting in better replication for grammatical or
lexical variants that are “fitter” in this sense.
There are some key differences between grammars/lexicons and genotypes. For one
thing, linguistic traits can be acquired throughout one’s life from many different sources,
although initial acquisition and (to a lesser extent) adolescence seem to be crucial
stages. Acquired (linguistic) traits can also be passed on to others. One consequence is
that linguistic history need not have the form of a tree, with languages splitting but never
rejoining, whereas genetic evolution is largely constrained to have a tree-like form
(despite the possibility of transfer of genetic material across species boundaries by viral
infection and so on). However, as a practical matter, the assumption that linguistic
history is a sort of tree structure has been found to be a good working approximation.
In particular, the basic sound structure and morphology of languages usually seems to
“descend” via a tree-structured graph of inheritance, with regular, lawful relationships
between the patterns of “parent” and “child” languages.
REFERENCE:
[Link]
[Link]
language_change.html
