Sound changes occur unconditionally?

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zompist
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Post by zompist »

Diogenes wrote:
zompist wrote:...
Data from dialect linguistics and Labov's investigation of ongoing sound change show, however, that an incipient sound change is quite sporadic. The change spreads to more and more words and may eventually affect every word with its phonological conditions-- so from a perspective centuries down the road it may look regular. But some exceptions may remain.

(A possible ongoing sound change: in Valley Girl talk, as represented by Moon Zappa, 'know' is pronounced [nEu]. So far this may affect only a few words (I think she pronounces 'oh' as [Eu] too). If it continues we could expect more and more /o/ to be affected, seemingly at random, until all or mostly all instances have changed.)
...
Does that mean that analogy is responsible for the regularity of sound change, if not for the sound change itself?
That's my suggestion. I don't have any proof of it; I just offer it as a reasonable explanation of the facts (namely, that sound changes seem to begin by affecting just a few words, and spread to more and more words, usually ending up affecting all the words they can.)

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Post by zompist »

vehke wrote:
zompist wrote:It has nothing to do with literary or national languages. If you go to a Quechua village and try speaking a different form of Quechua than the local dialect, they'll strongly correct you.
Of course, I wouldn't expect the local speaker to embrace sound change from outside of their community. Surely it would be different it that were the case for a group of speakers from within the community? Well, not surely, but that's what I would imagine especially if those speakers are respected.
Perhaps literary languages have nothing to do with it, however I don't think literary languages bind its speakers as a community.
If you look at any sound change early enough, it divides the community-- however you want to define 'community'. Sound changes aren't started by communities, they're started by individuals. So at some point, some individuals have the change and some don't.

Obviously, a successful sound change spreads from the first group to the second. My point is simply that this process is generally unconscious, and when the change does enter consciousness, it's likely to be disapproved of. People don't say, "You know, I really like the way my friend Jan says pin." If they like Jan, they might say the word the way she does, or at least move in that direction; if they don't, they might actually emphasize the difference and move the word in the opposite direction.

(The most useful book I know of on all this is Labov's Principles of Linguistic Change. It's very dry, but full of fascinating detail.)

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Post by finlay »

A sound change has a certain way of diffusing through a lexicon; it starts off slow for quite a while, then suddenly a whole massive chunk of the lexicon is affected by the sound change, before it then starts to go slow again; graphing it against time looks like an s. It's comparable to an epidemic, when it suddenly infects almost the entire population
The thing is though, it could abort at any time; thats why certain changes only occur on a few words; they haven't reached the sporadic stage yet, and certain changes have a couple of exceptions; they've passed the sporadic stage and only a few words are left to be affected. Many complete and that's where neogrammarian-type changes occur.

Sound changes aren't affected by semantic classes (afaik), but oftentimes a certain word or morpheme is left to make a distinction.
At other times the sound change is lexically specific, ie. it only affects one word or morpheme. This is often metathesis; that's why we get anenome but not *phomene.

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Post by Diogenes »

Ah, the logistic growth curve. I expected something like that.
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Post by finlay »

Aha! It has a name!

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Post by pharazon »

finlay wrote:Aha! It has a name!
It does indeed. It shows up in other places too, like population growth: the population grows exponentially at first, but levels out as it approaches the limit that the environment can support, as resources are used up. In this case of words, the model would be dW/dt = kW(L - W); that is, at any time t, the rate at which words are affected (dW/dt) is proportional to the number of words that have already been affected times the number that haven't. If anyone really wants to know, the equation for the words affected at a certain time comes out to W(t) = L/(1 + C*L*exp(-k*L*t)), where C is a constant that depends on how many words are affected initially. Enough babbling; I'll take any excuse to talk about math...

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Post by Diogenes »

For anyone who's interested: view http://www.ento.vt.edu/~sharov/PopEcol/lec5/explog.html on the topic of growth curves.

And now: The larch :mrgreen: Back to the topic.
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Post by gear »

pharazon wrote:
finlay wrote:Aha! It has a name!
It does indeed. It shows up in other places too, like population growth: the population grows exponentially at first, but levels out as it approaches the limit that the environment can support, as resources are used up. In this case of words, the model would be dW/dt = kW(L - W); that is, at any time t, the rate at which words are affected (dW/dt) is proportional to the number of words that have already been affected times the number that haven't. If anyone really wants to know, the equation for the words affected at a certain time comes out to W(t) = L/(1 + C*L*exp(-k*L*t)), where C is a constant that depends on how many words are affected initially. Enough babbling; I'll take any excuse to talk about math...
They look kinda like this, with the lower row being the kind that interests us:

Image

From the article at: http://mathworld.wolfram.com/LogisticEquation.html

Tsumu

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Post by finlay »

I knew it had a name, but I didn't know what it was.

Those curves don't look exactly right; there's a reasonable flat start phase, a very steep curve upwards, and then a similar levelling-off phase at the end.

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Post by Diogenes »

The curves are OK, especially the bottom line, which is concerned with growing to the maximum capacity. (The top line is concerned with shrinkin down to max. capacity.) It's only that the range selection is largely not symmetric to the curves.
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