Questions tagged [sound-change]
Systematic changes in pronunciation associated with languages and dialects. Includes segmental and prosodic changes. Sound-change is usually used in a diachronic sense and does not refer to the transient or adaptive changes of an individual.
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Grimm's Law and PIE in general
What's the evidence for stating that the transition from stops to fricatives took place in Proto-Germanic and not that fricatives became stops in the other PIE brances?
The question of this kind ...
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Proto-Indo-Iranian: When did Satemization happen?
Is it known when Satemization happened in Proto-Indo-Iranian? I am assuming that this sound change was a one time event specific to this branch of Indo-European. But I know that some of the western ...
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How might "Grante" > "Cante" > "Cam" have happened in the name "Cambridge"?
Etymonline says only that these changes were "due to Norman influence"
I've never heard of any change similar to gra > ca before, nor anteb > amb. I think for the latter I could ...
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Is there any place in the US where the Northern Cities Vowel Shift is not reversed among young speakers?
The Northern Cities Vowel Shift (NCVS) is a chain shift of vowels affecting six vowels in the Inland Northern United States during the twentieth century. This sound change progressed and spread ...
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Do liquid consonants ever become dental fricatives?
Is a sound change from /l/ or /r/ to a voiced dental fricative attested in any languages?
(Furthermore is there some database for searching sound changes?)
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What were the sound changes in Old Novgorod?
I'm into conlanging and got the idea of recreating a Novgorod language. I tried Wikipedia in both Russian and English, but I still don't understand the various sound changes as there isn't a lot of ...
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Criteria to posit a protolanguage has a phoneme not found in its daughter languages
As the title says, I am wondering what the criteria are that must be satisfied before accepting a linguist's claim that a proto-language's phoneme is actually different from any of the different ...
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Could the initial d- in the word for tongue be originally a prefix?
I am looking for the most ancient proto-world lemmas and it seems, the word for tongue is shared by many families from over the world. Here are some selected examples:
Niger-Congo:
* Proto-Heiban: ...
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Pronunciation of ‘hₐ’ in PIE
I have tried to find the sound hₐ-, for example "hₐeust(e)ro" engl. 'east', or hₐel, 'burn' , but also example hₐner, 'man' pronunciation, but I can't find it anywhere on the internet, ...
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Is there any sound change that can result in /ɞ/?
I am making a conlang where one of the distinctive sounds is /ɞ/. It is a rare vowel sound, and I searched Index Diachronica but couldn't find a sound change that results in it. The sound also does ...
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Middle Egyptian name for Seshat: Sšꜣt or Zẖꜣt?
Trying to learn Middle Egyptian myself, I just found out there are two transcriptions for the word 𓏞 (to scribe): √sšꜣ and √zẖꜣ:
In some corpora on Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae website the ...
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What is the term for the phones or phonemes after a synchronic or diachronic sound change or allophony rule?
If you have a sound change or allophony rule such as:
X -> Y / _Z
Is there a common term for X and Y?
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čьrnъ > czarny, čьrvenъ > czervony (Polish)
According to Wiktionary, Polish czarny is from PSl *čьrnъ, and czervony is from *čьrvenъ. At least prima facie the soft yers appears to have become different vowels in Polish.
I'm aware of the ...
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How fast does sound change occur?
Just what it says on the tin, really ─ how fast do sound changes happen? Since sound changes are generally individual rules, how many of them would occur in, say, a 100-year range? How much variation ...
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Establishing criteria for sounds likely to facilitate phonological mergers around them
I know extremely little about the history of sound changes in languages other than English, so that will be the source of my examples. However, I’m asking this question for a more general, cross-...
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On the effects of sound changes on case suffixes
I am working on a conlang and I came up with a question that I can't find a good answer too.
How does sound change effect suffixes, as whenever I work on conlangs with suffixes to mark different cases ...
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How did Otto Jespersen figure out the Great Vowel Shift?
How did Otto Jespersen figure out the Great Vowel Shift?
Surely, there were no pronunciation audio recordings available.
How did he know how British people had pronounced vowels centuries ago?
Have ...
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Can someone explain the ambiguity of the vowel [ø] and null segment [∅]?
Typically the IPA avoids using the same glyph in different scales to represent similar ideas however it seems to me that the representation of the Close-mid Front Rounded Vowel [ø] and the null marker ...
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Could some European languages get phonemic vowel length in future?
Could some European languages get phonemic vowel length in future? I don't like that so few languages in Europe have that. Which would cause phonemic long vowels?
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Is the sound change /y/ > /i/ more common than /y/ > /u/? Are there any good examples of /y/ shifting to /u/?
Front rounded vowels are somewhat uncommon. If we focus on the high front rounded vowel /y/ and consider cases where it was lost, it seems most likely to shift to /i/ by losing its rounding or to ...
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How Italian "dito" was derived from Latin DĬGĬTU(M)?
I'm trying to figure out which phenomena may be involved in the development of Italian "dito" from Latin DĬGĬTU(M).
I think one of them may be a loss of intervocalic -G-, as explained in ...
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Which is the origin of Romanian /h/?
According to Wikipedia,
Romanian has [...] the glottal fricative /h/.
You can hear it, for instance, in the Romanian word arhaic.
This cannot be of Latin origin because, as explained in the book La ...
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Is "nea" <- "*nivis" proof that metaphonic diphthongisation occured in Romanian before the loss of intervocalic "v"?
The metaphonic diphthongisation phenomenon is said to have occurred between the 6th and 8th century. But it must have happened before the loss of intervocalic "v", though I have only one ...
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About phonological history of Middle French
Schwa in hiatus dwindled in French a few centuries ago. Compare the example "saputum > sëu > su" at
Wikipedia/History of French
Does anyone know WHEN this sound change occurred? I ...
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SPE-style notation for combinatory sound changes
A phonological rule describes the change of one sound into another in a certain environment.
In its chapter on Attic Greek, the Cambridge Encyclopedia of the World's Ancient Languages, there is also a ...
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Ioticism in Greek
Are there any good theories about what motivated the pervasive ioticism that developed between ancient Greek and modern Greek? Are there any other languages that went through analogous changes?
The ...
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Phonological Development from PIE to Greek
I found the following phonological development (from PIE to Greek) patterns very interesting.
*kw>t / __ {e, i}
(e.g., *penkwe- > πέντε)
*gw>d / __ e
(*gwelbhu- > δελψύς)
*gwh>th / ...
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How did Gothic "𐌰𐌽𐌳𐌱𐌰𐌷𐍄𐌹" (andbahti) become Medieval Latin "ambasiator"?
I found the following etymology of the word "ambassador" on Wiktionary.
From Middle English ambassadore, from Anglo-Norman ambassadeur, ambassateur, from Old Italian ambassatore, ...
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What does it mean for consonant/ vowel sound to shift?
In this site,
With weak verbs, consonant sounds shift, often in the form of suffixes (endings) added onto the stem.
In the case of strong verbs, the vowel sound shifts, often within the stem.
What ...
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How did Latin "aqua" became Sardinian "abba" and Romanian "apă"?
The way I believe it happened was by the change of "w" into "v" and the fall of the velar "k". Furthermore, betacism caused the change of "v" to "b" ...
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Do Polish 'rz' /ž š/ and rhotic English have something in common? [closed]
This is a bit of a silly question that will need an explanation of the background that motivates this question.
Background. I met a man named Andrzej. He was called approximately An-jay /dʒ/, or ...
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Mechanism(s) as to how the pronunciations of「也」and its Old Chinese "homophones"/phonetically-derivative glyphs drifted to the modern range of sounds?
In my question on Chinese.SE, I learned that the modern character for "earth, ground"「地」(dì) used to be written in a multitude of ways, using either 「也」,「豕」, or「它」as phonetic components. ...
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How do we know that Avestan is sister of Vedic Sanskrit and not its daughter?
I am new here and to linguistics. Recently I have developed a passion and an interest for linguistics, but I am not familiar with it.
So I got into debate with a person from India. He was claiming ...
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Words in English which elided medial 'g' or 'v' (or initial 'h' before 'l', 'n', or 'r')
What I am looking for is a list of words which in Old English either had a medial 'v' sound (spelt 'f'), which was dropped in Modern English, so words like 'head' from 'heafod' and 'lord' from '...
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Havlík's law, 3, & 4 in Czech
According to Wiktionary, the words for 3 and 4 in Proto-Slavic are *trьmi and *četyrьmi, respectively, in the instrumental case. In (current) Czech, they evolved into třemi and čtyřmi. But if you ...
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Sound Changes concerning Vowel Harmony
How do sound changes operate in languages that have vowel harmony? Do Do they change with the vowels and thus create myriad words based on the different forms that it can take on based on affixes? I ...
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How diachronically stable is release type?
Are there examples of languages completely shifting from (vocalic) release of all coda stops to, say, nasal release?
I imagine substrate effects could account for some of these cases (cf. unreleased ...
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Could Old English /ea/ be a derivative from /a/?
"...This includes changes from the split between Old English and Old Frisian (c. AD 475)..." [Wikipedia]
The reflex of Proto-Germanic *au is spelled ea in Old English, but spelled a in Old ...
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Evolution of [v] to [b] and vice versa
There are many examples that show that two phones [v] and [b] are related:
b
v
Meaning
Old English to New English
* habban
have
have
Middle Persian to New Persian
varan
baran
rain
Middle Persian ...
user22226
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Why did Finnish and Sami noun-final A and I flip over?
I noticed a weird sound correspondence between Finnish and Northern Sami, and that is a list of words which pairwise end in -a or -ä in Finnish (this is the same archephoneme), and end in -i in ...
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How would've the Old Novgorodian language looked like?
I need help reconstructing the Old Novgorodian words for "earth", "hand", "bee" and "bird nest". I'm not good at linguistics at all and don't really understand ...
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Apparent exceptions to the sound law f -> h in old Spanish
At some point during the evolution of Spanish, several initial [f] became silent (this is represented with an h in modern Spanish). This explains words such as hacer, harina, herir and many more. ...
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Exceptions to Intrasyllabic Synharmony in modern Czech?
Studying Czech (and reading about the history of slavic languages) I encountered the concept of Intrasyllabic Synharmony, which somehow motivates the Slavic Palatalizations by explaining that the ...
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How to read sound change transcriptions? [closed]
https://chridd.nfshost.com/diachronica/
I don't understand what most of these transcriptions mean. I only know what #, #, and _x mean.
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Has a sound change ever happened that voiced only stops in between vowels and not fricatives?
Has this ever happened? Can it happen? I'm a novice in linguistics and I'm trying to study sound changes.
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Is there any tool where I can effectively find some examples of a specific sound change in world's languages?
For example, I have once read about an example of the sound change g > dʐ. I need it now but I cannot find it. Is there anything like "sound change corpus" where I can effectively find ...
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What is the name of this sound change, and do we have it in English?
I'm a Persian, I'm from Iran, and I speak Farsi.
Here, we have a very strange rule that we turn آ into و in informal conversations.
For example:
خانه = house (formal) /kh a ne/
خونه = house (informal) ...
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Is anything known about the origin of the hard "g" in "guénti" in Santiago, Cape Verdean Creole?
There is a word "guénti" /'gɛn ti/ in the Santiago dialect of Cape Verdean Creole, which is used to mean "people" or "you people/you all". It clearly comes from the ...
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I have read that in Mishnaic Hebrew, some pronounced the 6th letter as waw/w and some as vav/v What is the evidence of this?
I have read that in Mishnaic Hebrew, some pronounced the 6th letter as waw/w and some as vav/v What is the evidence of this?
I see it mentioned here https://forum.wordreference.com/threads/%D7%95-vav-...
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Is Ruki sound law a Satem "Rhotacism"
Is Ruki sound law a Satem variant of "Rhotacism"
English PIE Russian
ear h₂ṓws ухо /úxo/
sear *sh₂ews- сухо /súxo/
deer *dʰéws дух /dux/
alder h₂élis- ольха /olʹxá/
their ??? тех /tex/
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