Historical Sound Change Research Articles

Using acoustic-phonetic simulations to model historical sound change

Abstract We introduce a method for investigating sound change using audio proxies and interpolation between them. Using this method leads us to consider the possible trajectories of attested sound changes in acoustic space and allows us to run speech perception experiments with the interpolated sounds to examine the patterning of perceptual judgements. We discuss the implications for understanding rate and magnitude of sound changes and present the approach as one which might fruitfully be applied to a wide range of studies.

Using acoustic-phonetic simulations to model historical sound change

Abstract We introduce a method for investigating sound change using audio proxies and interpolation between them. Using this method leads us to consider the possible trajectories of attested sound changes in acoustic space and allows us to run speech perception experiments with the interpolated sounds to examine the patterning of perceptual judgements. We discuss the implications for understanding rate and magnitude of sound changes and present the approach as one which might fruitfully be applied to a wide range of studies.

Chen Di’s Investigations of the Ancient Pronunciations of the Mao Odes (Mao Shi guyin kao) and Textual Research in the Late Ming

Abstract Chen Di’s 1606 masterwork of historical phonology, Investigations of the Ancient Pronunciations of the Mao Odes, has been identified as foundational for Qing dynasty text-critical scholarship, providing systematic evidence for historical sound change via comparative analysis of the Odes’ rhyme schemes. I argue, however, that this research was motivated and shaped by Neo-Confucian xinxue commitments to embodied moral knowledge, typically seen at odds with later Qing approaches. Both Chen and his Taizhou school collaborator Jiao Hong located the moral substance of a text not in the intention of its sagely authors, but rather in the authentic emotional experiences prompted by its historically specific phonological and narrative features. Although recent scholarship has begun to reveal how xinxue fostered philological enquiry to reveal universal sagely truths, less well recognized is how xinxue could also motivate investigation of historical contexts—unsettling the division of moral concerns from the production of textual and historical knowledge.

Constraint reranking in diachronic OT: binary-feet and word-minimum phenomena in Austronesian

AbstractLanguages throughout the Malayo-Polynesian branch of Austronesian exhibit a range of sound changes which all appear to be triggered by the presence of a schwa in an open penultimate syllable. These changes are gemination of the final-syllable onset, deletion of penultimate schwa in three-or-more syllable words, and the shift of schwa to a full vowel in open penultimate syllables only. The changes are analyzed as a product of drift, whereby changes in daughter languages are motivated by some property of the proto-language. In this case, it is argued that schwa was a zero-mora vowel in Proto-Austronesian and Proto-Malayo-Polynesian, and that these changes worked to add a mora to a word which would otherwise contain a degenerate single-mora foot. The observed changes are then analyzed as a product of constraint promotion modeled in Diachronic Optimality Theory, whereby constraint movement over time may explain historical sound change. In the case of Malayo-Polynesian, it is shown that the promotion of the Binary Foot constraint (Ft-Bin)can explain all three of the attested schwa-triggered sound changes.

Representations of phonological changes ingoatand /r/ in theCollection of Nineteenth-century Grammars(CNG)

This article presents an analysis of vowels in thegoatset and /r/ in theCollection of Nineteenth-century Grammars(CNG) (cf. Anderwald 2016). My central questions concern the extent to which grammarians provide evidence for early diphthongisation ingoatwords and for changes in the distribution of /r/ variants in nineteenth-century prestige accents. I furthermore evaluate how far grammars are suitable as a source for researching historical sound changes. I show that monophthongs are the most frequently proposed variants forgoatand are often referred to as ‘improper diphthongs’. Some diphthongal descriptions exist for words in open syllables, before /l/ and before plosives in words likeknow,soulandboatrespectively. Concerning the distribution of /r/, I show that most grammars continued to propose two sounds, which were almost exclusively described as ‘rough’ or ‘trilled’, and ‘smooth’ or ‘soft’. However, some grammarians also argued for /r/ having only one sound in all positions and complete post-vocalic /r/ absence. Overall, the grammars in the CNG display a considerable amount of what I assume to be copying from scholars such as Walker (1791) and Murray (1795). Thus, I argue that great care is required when attempting to infer phonological changes from nineteenth-century grammars.

Vowel Phonotactics in Modern Korean Phonology: A Corpus-Based Approach

Ideophones are believed to exhibit distinct phonotactic patterns compared to regular language, in their expressiveness. Vowel harmony can be observed in ideophones in Modern Korean. However, over time, Korean has gradually lost its regular vowel harmony process, due to the influx of foreign words, especially from Chinese, and historical sound changes like the vowel shift of /ɔ/ to different vowel types. Previous studies have mainly focused on the vowel patterns of ideophones without necessarily comparing the degree of vowel harmony between ideophones and other lexical strata. This lack of comparison makes it challenging to assess the level of corruption in vowel harmony specifically within ideophones, relative to other components of the lexicon. To address this gap, this paper examines vowel patterns extracted from the online dictionary of Korean, developed by the National Institute of the Korean Language (NIKL) with contributions from anonymous users and specialists. The analysis specifically explores vowel patterns across lexical items with varying syllable lengths, focusing on the lexical stratum, adverbial parts of speech, and the semantic meaning of the adverbials. This examination aims to assess the regularity of vowel sequencing and determine the extent of purity in vowel harmony patterns. The quantitative analysis of the compiled dictionary provides valuable insights into the degree of irregular phonotactics and its relationship to sound symbolism in Modern Korean.

The segmental inflection of Bumthang verbs: exploring the boundary between phonology and morphophonology

This paper presents a synoptic account of verbal suffixation in the Ura dialect of Bumthang, a language of central Bhutan. Examining verbal allomorphy shows the persistence of exceptions to historical sound changes in contemporary allophonic and allomorphic processes, and reveals striking contrasts with the culturally dominant Tibetic languages of the area. We examine the ways in which some of the allomorphy is motivated by patterns seen in the phonology of the language more widely, while some of the changes reflect purely (arbitrary) morphophonological processes.

How fast did Cicero speak?

While languages convey significantly different amounts of both information per syllable and syllables per second, recent research suggests that the product of these values— information conveyed per second—is much less variable. Using new methods of extrapolation and resampling, I was able to estimate the information conveyed per syllable in a written Classical Latin corpus. I was then able to use this cross-linguistic consistency to estimate the natural speech rate of Classical Latin, a language that has not been natively spoken for thousands of years. My analysis suggests that it was spoken at a rate significantly slower than modern Romance languages, fairly similar to modern English; a high-level consideration of historical sound changes in Romance supports this conclusion, lending additional credence to my results.

Dorsal harmony in Squliq Atayal: An Acoustic and Ultrasound Study

Dorsal harmony, understood as a process of changing from /*k/ into /q/ when followed by a uvular /q/ or a pharyngeal /ħ/, has been reported as a historical sound change in Atayal dialects, such as Squliq and Skikun. However, it is unattested if the observed dorsal harmony also occurs in those Atayal dialects as a synchronic morpho-phonological process. In the present study, we examined dorsal harmony in Squliq Atayal through ultrasonography and acoustic measurement (onset F3 – F2). Generalized additive mixed models (GAMMs), principal component analysis (PCA) and linear discriminant analysis (LDA) were applied to fit the tongue contours and compare the similarities of tongue images across different conditions. One participant showed that all variants of [k] were deviated from Baseline [k], and the linear discriminant (LD) values of all variants of [k] fell between Baseline [k] and [q]. The other participant exhibited consistent tongue postures in Short distance [k] and Cross-boundary [q]-[k]. The observed results suggest that dorsal harmony occurs in Squliq Atayal as a morpho-phonological process. Moreover, dorsal harmony is physiologically driven and best accounted for by coarticulatory aggressiveness, though with some individual variations. These variations nevertheless may support a coarticulatory path to sound change.

The evolution of tonally conditioned allomorphy in Triqui: evidence from spontaneous speech corpora

Abstract One of the defining characteristics of tonal systems in phonological theory is the notion of tonal stability (Goldsmith, John. 1990. Autosegmental and metrical phonology. Oxford: Blackwell; Yip, Moira. 2002. Tone. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Tones remain stable even if their tone-bearing unit changes or is deleted. In the context of historical sound change, tones may either persist as floating tones (from an autosegmental-metrical perspective) or fuse with adjacent syllables and give rise to more complex tonal inventories. However, the process of segmental loss which ultimately conditions historical tonal change is gradual in nature. Tone-bearing units may lenite or they may be optionally realized, leading listeners to rely on coarticulatory cues or phonetic information on adjacent syllables. In the current paper, I examine how variation in the realization of clitic pronouns is conditioned by adjacent tonal cues in Itunyoso Triqui (Otomanguean) within a corpus of spontaneous speech recordings. This research examines and provides evidence for the hypothesis that tonally conditioned allomorphy arises specifically when two conditions are met: (a) there is a morphological context where prosodic units are likely to lenite (highly redundant contexts); and (b) adjacent tonal cues are most informative at this morphophonological boundary. The findings shed light not only on how phonologically conditioned allomorphy arises but also on how variable deletion is sensitive to patterns of multiple exponence during language use.

Speaking rate and language-specific voice onset time effects on burst amplitude: Cross-linguistic observations and implications for sound change

The relationship between speaking rate and burst amplitude in voiceless plosives was investigated in two languages with differing oro-laryngeal timing implementations of phonological voicing, North American English and Indian Tamil. Burst amplitude (reflecting both intraoral pressure and flow geometry of the oral channel) was hypothesized to decrease in CV syllables with increasing speaking rate, which imposes temporal constraints on both intraoral pressure buildup behind the oral occlusion as well as respiratory air flow. Increased speaking rate led to decreased burst amplitude (relative to vowel amplitude) in both languages, with the magnitude of the effect being considerably weaker in Tamil, which has short-lag implementation of voice onset time. Bilabials in both languages were affected disproportionately relative to other places of articulation. Additionally, burst amplitudes were lower overall in Tamil, reflecting lower intraoral pressure which promotes faster vocalic onset. Results are discussed in terms of language-internaland extra-linguistic phonetic phenomena potentially serving as perceptual triggers for historical sound change.

Deciphering Undersegmented Ancient Scripts Using Phonetic Prior

Most undeciphered lost languages exhibit two characteristics that pose significant decipherment challenges: (1) the scripts are not fully segmented into words; (2) the closest known language is not determined. We propose a decipherment model that handles both of these challenges by building on rich linguistic constraints reflecting consistent patterns in historical sound change. We capture the natural phonological geometry by learning character embeddings based on the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). The resulting generative framework jointly models word segmentation and cognate alignment, informed by phonological constraints. We evaluate the model on both deciphered languages (Gothic, Ugaritic) and an undeciphered one (Iberian). The experiments show that incorporating phonetic geometry leads to clear and consistent gains. Additionally, we propose a measure for language closeness which correctly identifies related languages for Gothic and Ugaritic. For Iberian, the method does not show strong evidence supporting Basque as a related language, concurring with the favored position by the current scholarship. 1

Фонетические особенности ненецких заимствований в обско-угорских языках

The article deals with the Nenets borrowings in the Ob-Ugric languages: Khanty and Mansi. The main list of these borrowings was compiled by Wolfgang Steinitz in a work published more than half a century ago. In the paper I focus on phonetic features of the borrowed words. These borrowings represent predominantly the cultural vocabulary and are geographically quite limited being presented only in the northern dialects of Mansi and Khanty. Despite of this many of these words retain very archaic features of Nenets phonetics. This allows us to consider linguistic contacts between the Ob-Ugrians and the Nenets as rather old. Consideration of the corpus of the borrowings also allows to shed some light on the relative chronology of historical sound changes in the Nenets language. In the paper all Nenets loans in Mansi and Khanty are compared with their possible sources in Tundra Nenets and in Forest Nenets. This comparison shows that in Forest Nenets a potential corresponding word is often missing or looks phonetically too different and therefore can not be regarded as the source of borrowing. Thus, the donor language was definitely the Tundra Nenets, and not the Forest Nenets language. Mansi and Khanty words borrowed from Tundra Nenets may reflect the following archaic features of Nenets historical phonetics: final vowels (before reduction into °); final consonants, changed into the glottal stop in modern Nenets; intervocalic -m-, changed into - w- in modern Nenets; final glide -w, disappeared in modern Nenets. All words borrowed in Ob-Ugric languages from Nenets can be divided in two groups with respect to these parameters: some of them definitely preserve a more archaic state of Nenets phonetics, whereas others are phonetically much closer to modern Nenets words. Another feature that allows to evaluate the relative age of borrowings is the labialization of vowels in Kazym Khanty and in Mansi: in earlier borrowings Nenets vowel a has changed in Kazym Khanty and Mansi into a labial vowel, whereas in later ones it has preserved its original quality.

Analysis of an invented writing system for the Shanghainese language

The present study uses qualitative methods to analyze and restore an invented missionary writing system for the Shanghainese language, and uses the restoration to check for historical sound change. The project consists of two parts: the analysis and restoration of the orthography and the confirmation of historical sound changes in Shanghainese. The restoration of the writing system provides all symbols with equivalent International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) symbols. Following the restoration to IPA is an explanation of the rules for combining initial and final symbols to form a single character, as well as rules for tonal distinction. The analysis of the restored orthography compares its development with the academic criteria for orthography development, and finds that it is a sound writing system. The evaluation also reviews the sociolinguistic criteria crucial for orthography acceptance, and shows that the writing system does not meet these criteria in present day Shanghai. The results of the check for historical sound change confirm that many of the sounds not found in present day Shanghainese existed in this writing system. The phones found in this writing system are able to confirm the disappearance or merger of various sounds in Shanghainese since the mid 19th century. Overall, the study shows that the invented writing system is sound, but would not be accepted in Shanghai today. However, it should be reviewed by other linguists as having the possibility to represent other languages.

Directionality in sound change from asymmetries in acoustic distribution

Following the work of John Ohala, historical sound changes are thought to take place by misperception of the input on the part of the listener. Any account of sound change based on misperception, though, faces a paradox: if X sounds like Y, Y should also sound like X, and yet we often see sound changes that are only attested in one direction. A potential solution is to think of phonetic categories as distributions in acoustic space, and so asymmetries in sound change (X > Y, *Y > X) come from asymmetries in the spread of the distribution of X and Y. If X is a very variable phonetic category with a thick-tailed distribution, a high proportion of its tokens should cross the perceptual boundary and be misperceived as Y; if Y has a narrow distribution, only a very small proportion of its tokens should be perceived as X. We predict that unidirectional sound changes should involve a change from a high-variance to a low-variance category. This experiment tests a case study of asymmetric nasal place assimilation (VnpV > VmpV, *VmpV > VnpV) on a sample of six speakers in three vowel contexts. In the contexts aa and ii, the sequence np before the change had a higher-variance distribution of F2 transition (a cue to nasal place) than the sequence mp after the change. In uu, the sequence after the change had the higher variance. These results give partial support to our hypothesis.

Articulatory insights on the evolution of nasal vowels in Slavic

The complex articulatory-acoustic mapping of the vocal tract suggests that the acoustic effects of nasalization are tied to other articulatory mechanisms besides velopharyngeal opening; this has been borne out in many recent studies. But do these findings settle on any consensus regarding the articulatory mechanisms (besides velopharyngeal opening) that differentiate nasal and oral vowels and cause shifts in vowel inventories across time? Do articulatory results mirror or contradict the relatively larger corpus of findings regarding the acoustics of nasalization? Are these results idiosyncratic reflections of language differences or do they represent universal properties of phonological development? To approach these questions, results of a series of magnetic resonance and electromagnetic articulography studies of French, Portuguese, and Hindi are compared to historical sound changes in Slavic, a language family where most nasal vowels are now lost. Nasal vowels have been implicated in a number of diachro...

Dialectal duration variations reveal historical sound change

This study models duration patterns of different dialectal regions to evaluate the spread of a phonological process. Er [ɚ] is a diminutive suffix in Chinese and is a major linguistic feature differentiating northern and southern Mandarin speech. This study evaluates the duration of the er-suffix along with its host syllable in a sentence reading task. The participants were from three regional groups chosen to examine the spread of this feature—Beijing, Mid-China, and Taiwan. Linear regression models were used to analyze duration variations quantitatively. Results reveal that Beijing speakers exhibit the most advanced er-suffixation, as expected. Duration values of words with or without the er-suffix are nearly identical, suggesting that er has been incorporated into the host syllable and has lost its own syllabic status. In contrast, speakers from Taiwan show the least advanced er-suffixation, where the suffix maintains its syllabic status with full duration. Speakers from Mid-China show an intermediate stage in accord with the geographical location. The duration contrast is consistent with reported diachronic phonological changes. The method suggests that duration patterns can be used to evaluate the spread of phonological processes, projecting synchronic, regional variations to their diachronic development.

Acquisition of the Alveo-Palatal Fricative /ʒ/ in L2 English and Jamaican Creole: A Comparative Study

This study investigates the claim that the strategies employed by second/foreign language learners are the same as those used by speakers of Creole languages. The speech of two speakers of the well-known Broad Jamaican Creole is checked against the performance of Saudi learners of English, focusing on the production of the voiced alveo-palatal fricative/ʒ/. The findings suggest that the speakers in the two groups produce the voiced affricate/dʒ/ instead, suggesting perhaps that the above claim is valid. This study provides external evidence to the validity of such theories as sound substitution, markedness, and historical sound change which are said to shape early language acquisition, including child language.

Acquisition of the Inter-Dental Fricatives /θ/ and /ð/ in ESL/EFL and Jamaican Creole: A Comparative Study

This study aims at investigating to what extent the linguistic processes exhibited in creolization parallel those manifested by Arab learners of English in particular and those of child language and second/foreign language in general. Another aim of the study is to highlight the link between second/foreign language learning and historical change. To this end, the speech of two speakers of the Broad Jamaican Creole was compared with the performance of Saudi school and university learners of English as a foreign language and data from child language, with respect to the pronunciation of English inter-dental fricatives /θ/ and /e/. The results show that learning in the above three situations takes place according to the same principles. Furthermore, the sound substitutions made in the three situations (i.e. [t], [d] respectively) are the same as those witnessed in historical sound change.

Rapid and multifaceted effects of second-language learning on first-language speech production

Despite abundant evidence of malleability in speech production, previous studies of the effects of late second-language learning on first-language speech production have been limited to advanced learners. This study examined these effects in novice learners, adult native English speakers enrolled in elementary Korean classes. In two acoustic studies, learners' production of English was found to be influenced by even brief experience with Korean. The effect was consistently one of assimilation to phonetic properties of Korean; moreover, it occurred at segmental, subsegmental, and global levels, often simultaneously. Taken together, the results suggest that cross-language linkages are established from the onset of second-language learning at multiple levels of phonological structure, allowing for pervasive influence of second-language experience on first-language representations. The findings are discussed with respect to current notions of cross-linguistic similarity, language development, and historical sound change.