Phonological Change - Split

Split

In a split (Hoenigswald's "secondary split"), a new contrast arises when allophones of a phoneme cease being in complementary distribution and are therefore necessarily independent structure points, i.e. contrastive. This mostly comes about because of some loss of distinctiveness in the environment of one or more allophones of a phoneme.

A simple example is the rise of the contrast between nasal and oral vowels in French. A full account of this history is complicated by the subsequent changes in the phonetics of the nasal vowels, but the development can be compendiously illustrated via the present-day French phonemes /a/ and /ã/:

• Step 1: *a > *ã when a nasal immediately follows: *čantu "song" > (still phonemically /tʃantu/);
• Step 2: at some point in the history of French when speakers consistently stopped making an oral closure with the tongue, we had, that is /tʃãt/ (if not /ʃãt/) and finally, with the loss of the final stop, modern French /ʃã/ chant "song", distinct from French /ʃa/ chat "cat" solely by the contrast between the nasal and the oral articulation of the vowels, and thus with many other forms in which /a/ and /ã/ contrast.

Note 1: the nasalization of a vowel before a nasal is found very widely in the world's languages, but is not at all universal. In modern French, for example, vowels before a nasal are oral. That they used to be nasalized, like the vowels before lost nasals, is indicated by certain phonetic changes not always reflected in the orthography: Fr. femme "woman" /fam/ (with the lowering of (nasalized ) to *ã prior to denasalization).

Note 2: unusually for a split, the history of the French innovation, even including some changes in vowel cavity features, can be readily inferred by internal reconstruction. This is because the contrastive feature in a vowel system usually has a nasal in its history, which makes for straightforward surmises. There are also clear alternations, as /bɔ̃/ "good" (masc.) vs. /bɔn/ (fem.), while such pairs as /fin/ "fine" (fem.) and /fɛ̃/ (masc.) together with derivatives like rafiné /rafine/ "refined" indicate what happened to nasalized *i.

Phonemic split was a major factor in the creation of the contrast between voiced and voiceless fricatives in English. Originally, to oversimplify a bit, Old English fricatives were voiced between voiced sounds and voiceless elsewhere. Thus /f/ was in fisc "fish", fyllen "to fill", hæft "prisoner", ofþyrsted "athirst", líf "life", wulf "wolf". But in say the dative singular of "life", that is lífe, the form was (as in English alive, being an old prepositional phrase on lífe); the plural of wulf, wulfas, was, as still seen in wolves. The voiced fricative is typically seen in verbs, too (often with variations in vowel length of diverse sources): gift but give, shelf but shelve. Such alternations are to be seen even in loan words, as proof vs prove (though not as a rule in borrowed plurals, thus proofs, uses, with voiceless fricatives).

Note 1: unlike the French example, there is no chance of recovering the historical source of the alternations in English between /s θ f/ and /z ð v/ merely through inspection of the modern forms. The conditioning factor (original location of the voiced alternants between vowels, for example) is quite lost and with little reason to even suspect the original state of affairs; and anyway the original distributions have been much disturbed by analogical leveling. Worthy and (in some dialects) greasy have voiced fricative (next to the voiceless ones in worth and grease) but adjectives in -y otherwise do not alternate: bossy, glassy, leafy, earthy, breathy, saucy, etc (cf. glaze, leaves, breathe, and note that even in dialects with /z/ in greasy, the verb to grease always has /s/).

Note 2: the phoneme /ʃ/ does not alternate with /ʒ/ (and never did). In native words, /ʃ/ is from *sk, and either the change of this sequence to /ʃ/ postdated the rearranging of voicing in pre-Old English fricatives, or else it was phonetically long between vowels, originally, much like the /ʃ/ of present-day Italian (pesce "fish" is phonetically ) and long fricatives, just like sequences of fricatives, were always voiceless in Old English, as in cyssan "to kiss". The Early Modern English development of /ʃ/ < */sj/, as in nation, mission, assure, vastly postdated the period when fricatives became voiced between vowels.

Note 3: a common misstatement of cases like OE /f/ > Modern English /f, v/ is that a "new phoneme" has been created. Not so. A new contrast has been created. Both NE /f/ and /v/ are new phonemes, differing in phonetic specifications and distribution from OE /f/. Without doubt, one component in this misunderstanding is the orthography. If, instead of speaking of the development of Old English /f/ we said that OE /ɰ/ split into /f/ and /v/, there would presumably be less confused talk of "a" new phoneme arising in the process.

It is sometimes claimed that the general account given here, namely that allophones (positional variants) are in effect "stranded" when something changes in the conditioning environment, is incoherent and self-contradictory. The thinking is that if the conditions determining the distribution of a positional variant are lost, the phonetic features of the variant should switch to whatever is called for in the changed environment. That is, when the vowel at the end of OE on lífe "alive" went unpronounced, the allophone of /f/ should have "reverted" in a sense to, the form called for in word-final position. This view rests upon a faulty notion of how phonology "works" in the real world of speech acts. A demonstration of this would require elaborate technical discussion; it is perhaps enough to take a look at the example of nasal vowels in French, given above, and ask yourself whether failing to make an oral closure in connection with a phoneme like /m n/, either occasionally or habitually, would really be expected to "cause" the velum to snap shut. For one thing, it hardly could, since it is already open by the time the speaker gets to the point in the speech act where the conditioning factor is (or is not) omitted. And that very fact is instructive for understanding the mechanisms of phonemic split.