Phonological Change - Loss

Loss

In Hoenigwald's original scheme, loss—the disappearance of a segment, or even of a whole phoneme—was treated as a form of merger, depending on whether the loss was conditioned or unconditioned. The "element" that a vanished segment or phoneme merged with was "zero". The situation in which a highly inflected language has formations without any affix at all: Latin alter "(the) other", for example, is quite common, but is specifically nominative singular masculine; cf. altera nom.sg.fem., alterum acc.sg. masc., etc.; it is the only one of the 30 forms that make up the paradigm that is not explicitly marked with endings for gender, number, and case. From a historical perspective, there is no problem here, since alter is from *alteros (overtly nominative singular and masculine), with the regular loss of the short vowel after *-r- and the truncation of the resulting word-final cluster *-rs, but descriptively it is problematic to say that the "nominative singular masculine" here is signaled by the absence of any affix. More parsimonious is to view alter as more than what it looks like, viz. /alterØ/, "marked" for case, number, and gender by an affix, just like the other 29 forms in the paradigm. It is merely the case that the "marker" in question is not a phoneme of sequence of phonemes, but the element /Ø/.

Along the way, it is hard to know when to stop positing zeros, and whether to regard one zero as different from another: for example, if the zero not-marking can (as in he can) as "3rd person singular" is the same zero that not-marks deer as "plural", or if are both basically a single morphological placeholder. If it is determined that there is a zero on the end of deer in three deer, it is uncertain whether English adjectives agree with the number of the noun they modify, using this same zero affix. (Deictics do: cf. this deer, these deer.) In some theories of syntax it is useful to have an overt marker on a singular noun in a sentence such as My head hurts, because the syntactic mechanism needs something explicit to generate the singular suffix on the verb; therefore, all English singular nouns may be marked with yet another zero.

It seems possible to avoid all these issues by considering loss as a separate basic category of phonological change, and leave zero out of it.

As stated above, one can regard loss as both a kind of conditioned merger (when only some expressions of a phoneme are lost) and a disappearance of a whole structure point. The former is much the more common, and is common absolutely.

• In Latin there are many consonant clusters that lose a member or two: tostus "dired" < *torstos, multrum "milking stool" < *molktrom, scultus "carved" < *scolptos, cēna "dinner" < *kertsnā, lūna "moon" < *louwksnā ("lantern" or the like), and many, many more.

• Greek lost all stops from the end of a word (so *kʷit "what" > Greek ti, *deḱṃt "ten" > déka, *wanakt "O prince" > ána), but stops generally survive elsewhere. PIE *s drops medially between voiced sounds in Greek, but is preserved in final position and in some consonant clusters.

• Old English (voiceless velar fricative) is everywhere lost as such, but usually leaves traces behind (cheshirization). In furh "furrow" and mearh "marrow", it vocalizes. It is elided (albeit with varying effects on the preceding vowel, such as lengthening) in night, knight, might, taught, naught, freight, fought, plow (Brit. plough, OE plōh), bought, through, though, slaughter; but /f/ in laugh, trough, tough, enough (and daughter can be found in The Pilgrim's Progress riming with after, indeed the spelling dafter is actually attested)
• /g k/ are lost in English in word-initial position before /n/: gnaw, gnat, knight, know. /t/ is lost after fricatives before nasals and /l/: soften, often, castle, bristle, chestnut, Christmas, hasten
• In many words /f/ (that is, Old English ) was lost between vowels: auger, hawk, newt < OE nafogar, hafoc, efete ("lizard"), and in some alternative (poetic) forms: e'en "evening", o'er "over", e'er "ever"; Scottish siller "silver", and others.

The ends of words often have sound-laws that apply there only, and many such special developments consist of the loss of a segment. The early history and prehistory of English has seen several waves of loss of elements, vowels and consonants alike, from the ends of words, first in Proto-Germanic, and from there to Proto-West-Germanic, then to Old and Middle and Modern English, shedding bits from the ends of words at every step of the way. There is in Modern English next to nothing left of the elaborate inflectional and derivational apparatus of PIE, indeed of Proto-Germanic, due to the successive ablation of the phonemes making up these suffixes.

Total unconditional loss is, as mentioned, not too common. Latin /h/ appears to have been lost everywhere in all varieties of Proto-Romance. Proto-Indo-European laryngeals survived as consonants only in Anatolian languages, though leaving plenty of traces of their former presence (see Laryngeal theory).