Apparent Naturalness in Faroese Phonology

Abstract

During the last decade, generative linguists have tried various ways of building phonetic naturalness into the phonological evaluation measure. The phonological component being a mental reality, it is, however, not reasonable to give reference to physical phonetic properties such a prominent place. A return to more formal principles, such as the economy criterion originally suggested by Chomsky and Halle, might be better. Many morphophonemic alternations are not synchronically natural (in the phonetic sense) at all, but only seem so because they have preserved traits from their historically phonetic origin. This is demonstrated here for two seemingly natural rules in Faroese, Velar Softening and Hiatus Insertion. In all Faroese dialects, morphological simplification has burdened the rules with exceptions, but the rules have nowhere spread to new forms so as to become exceptionless again, as would be expected from a phonetically natural rule. In closing, the role of perceptional ease as a factor in language change is discussed.