Principles of Sound Change
The following statements are used as heuristics in formulating sound changes as understood within the Neogrammarian model. However, for modern linguistics, they are not taken as inviolable rules; rather, they are seen as guidelines.
Sound change has no memory: Sound change does not discriminate between the sources of a sound. If a previous sound change causes X,Y > Y (features X and Y merge as Y), a new one cannot affect only original X's.
Sound change ignores grammar: A sound change can only have phonological constraints, like X > Z in unstressed syllables. It cannot, for example, only affect adjectives. The only exception to this is that a sound change may or may not recognise word boundaries, even when they are not indicated by prosodic clues. Also, sound changes may be regularized in inflectional paradigms (such as verbal inflection), in which case the change is no longer phonological but morphological in nature.
Sound change is exceptionless: If a sound change can happen at a place, it will. It affects all sounds that meet the criteria for change. Apparent exceptions are possible, due to analogy and other regularization processes, or another sound change, or an unrecognized conditioning factor. This is the traditional view, expressed by the Neogrammarians. In past decades it has been shown that sound change doesn't necessarily affect all the words it in principle could. However, when a sound change is initiated, it often expands to the whole lexicon given enough time, though not always. For example, in Spanish the fronting of Vulgar Latin before seems to have reached every possible word it could, but the change involving voicing of word-initial Latin to as in colaphus > golpe and cattus > gato did not, e.g. canna > caña. See also lexical diffusion.
Sound change is unstoppable: All languages vary from place to place and time to time, and neither writing nor media prevent this change.
Read more about this topic: Sound Change
Famous quotes containing the words principles, sound and/or change:
“It seems to me that man is made to act rather than to know: the principles of things escape our most persevering researches.”
—Frederick The Great (1712–1786)
“A village seems thus, where its able-bodied men are all plowing the ocean together, as a common field. In North Truro the women and girls may sit at their doors, and see where their husbands and brothers are harvesting their mackerel fifteen or twenty miles off, on the sea, with hundreds of white harvest wagons, just as in the country the farmers’ wives sometimes see their husbands working in a distant hillside field. But the sound of no dinner-horn can reach the fisher’s ear.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“For as change is horror,
Virtue is really stubbornness
And only in the light of lost words
Can we imagine our rewards.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)