Recent Sound Changes
Recent Sound Changes
I know of recent sound changes in English; Things like whale/wail merging, pin/pen merging, the Northern Cities Vowel Shift, etc. I'm interested in recent sound changes in other European languages. I found this ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonologic ... 2C_c._2000 ) for French, but nothing for German. Is there such a list somewhere?
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sirdanilot
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- Joined: Sat Aug 18, 2007 1:47 pm
- Location: Leiden, the Netherlands
Re: Recent Sound Changes
In Dutch, we see some fun recent sound changes:
- ən / əl -> ɔn / ɔl . For example, spannend is pronounced often as [spɑnɔ~nt] (yes also nasalized in the case of n). This is not something that came out of thin air, but it comes from certain northern-hollandic dialects. Because this region is close to Amsterdam, it gets more influential, and you hear it more and more on TV etcetera. And people tend to copy things that they hear on TV. People often like to mock this, 'spannond !' is now a very popular 'funny' way of saying the normal word ' spannend', even in writing.
- w in iw, e:w etc. to velar l, to merge with existing words ending in velar l. Ie. [nils] 'Niels' (a proper name) merges with *[niws] 'news'. I think this is a case of over-correction; like in many languages, the opposite tendency exists in Dutch (l to velar l to w), and for some reason people try to combat this, but in the process they pronounce velar l in places where there SHOULD actually be /w/. A good example of this is weather-person Helga van Leur, who would say something like 'en vandaag [snɪ:lt] het in Nederland' (normal: [snɪ:wt]) ' and today it snows in the Netherlands'. I know several other people who do this as well.
- ən / əl -> ɔn / ɔl . For example, spannend is pronounced often as [spɑnɔ~nt] (yes also nasalized in the case of n). This is not something that came out of thin air, but it comes from certain northern-hollandic dialects. Because this region is close to Amsterdam, it gets more influential, and you hear it more and more on TV etcetera. And people tend to copy things that they hear on TV. People often like to mock this, 'spannond !' is now a very popular 'funny' way of saying the normal word ' spannend', even in writing.
- w in iw, e:w etc. to velar l, to merge with existing words ending in velar l. Ie. [nils] 'Niels' (a proper name) merges with *[niws] 'news'. I think this is a case of over-correction; like in many languages, the opposite tendency exists in Dutch (l to velar l to w), and for some reason people try to combat this, but in the process they pronounce velar l in places where there SHOULD actually be /w/. A good example of this is weather-person Helga van Leur, who would say something like 'en vandaag [snɪ:lt] het in Nederland' (normal: [snɪ:wt]) ' and today it snows in the Netherlands'. I know several other people who do this as well.
Re: Recent Sound Changes
Apparently Osage gained the phoneme /l/ no earlier than the 40s or so, from reduction of clusters with /r/.
Re: Recent Sound Changes
Yeah, it's very instructive comparing Quintero's orthography with LaFlesche's. All of the clusters he writes with <th> have since been simplified. Apparently /gð/ and /kð/ may have been distinguished for a while as [dl] and [hl˳] but the speakers Quintero worked with were no longer consistent when it came to making that distinction.Theta wrote:Apparently Osage gained the phoneme /l/ no earlier than the 40s or so, from reduction of clusters with /r/.
She also treats /b/ and /r/ as phonemes even though they are both restricted to the cluster [bɾ] (from historical /wð/ <bth>).
Re: Recent Sound Changes
I haven't been able to find a list for German, but I can list a few things I've noticed and hopefully others can chime in, too.
Loss of the opposition between /a/ and /aː/ seems to be spreading. In school we learned the shibboleth "Halle an der Saale". But I met someone in Germany once who wrote his address as "Sallestrasse" when it was actually "Saalestrasse".
Conversely, borrowings have disturbed the historic distribution of vowels. With the notable exception of /ɛː/ (which may be the result of a spelling pronunciation), long vowels were tense and short vowels were lax (or vice-versa, depending on which feature you considered primary). Now short tense vowels can occur in unstressed syllables.
As for /ɛː/, because it's such an odd exception, many speakers have merged it with /eː/. Others may never have had such a distinction to begin with.
Recent borrowings have also added the new phonemes /ʒ/ and /d͡ʒ/. There are still older speakers who merge these with their voiceless counterparts, but that's clearly on the way out. Phonologists are divided over weather to analyse [d͡ʒ] as an affricate, actually, rather than a cluster, and this is also the case for [t͡ʃ].
One of the biggest changes, I think, has been the vocalisation of coda /r/. This used to be considered a dialect feature (as evidenced by older dialect spellings which substitute a for er, e.g. "Aba, liaba Bruada!"). Now it's considered normative (although the full merger of /aː/ with /ar/ is dialectal and extremely restricted).
Loss of the opposition between /a/ and /aː/ seems to be spreading. In school we learned the shibboleth "Halle an der Saale". But I met someone in Germany once who wrote his address as "Sallestrasse" when it was actually "Saalestrasse".
Conversely, borrowings have disturbed the historic distribution of vowels. With the notable exception of /ɛː/ (which may be the result of a spelling pronunciation), long vowels were tense and short vowels were lax (or vice-versa, depending on which feature you considered primary). Now short tense vowels can occur in unstressed syllables.
As for /ɛː/, because it's such an odd exception, many speakers have merged it with /eː/. Others may never have had such a distinction to begin with.
Recent borrowings have also added the new phonemes /ʒ/ and /d͡ʒ/. There are still older speakers who merge these with their voiceless counterparts, but that's clearly on the way out. Phonologists are divided over weather to analyse [d͡ʒ] as an affricate, actually, rather than a cluster, and this is also the case for [t͡ʃ].
One of the biggest changes, I think, has been the vocalisation of coda /r/. This used to be considered a dialect feature (as evidenced by older dialect spellings which substitute a for er, e.g. "Aba, liaba Bruada!"). Now it's considered normative (although the full merger of /aː/ with /ar/ is dialectal and extremely restricted).
Re: Recent Sound Changes
I hate that merger, because my name is Niels and I'm from a place that doesn't have that merger. In primary school, we had a teacher from somewhere in Holland, and whenever she'd say 'nieuws', I thought she said my name, and whenever she'd say my name, I ignored her because I thought she was talking about the newssirdanilot wrote:- w in iw, e:w etc. to velar l, to merge with existing words ending in velar l. Ie. [nils] 'Niels' (a proper name) merges with *[niws] 'news'.
— o noth sidiritt Tormiott
Re: Recent Sound Changes
Icelandic off the top of my head:
Höggmæli: b, d, g > [ʔ] before n so höfn 'harbor' [hœʔn] rather than [hœpn]
Frication of k before n: læknir 'doctor' [laixnır] rather than [laihknır]
Loss of phonemic voiceless n: hnútur 'knot' [nutʏr] rather than [n̥utʏr]
Intervocalic voicing of s: lesa 'read' [leɛːza] rather than [leɛːsa]
Then there's also various hypercorrections based on spelling such as [f] before s back to p: skips 'ship (gen.)' [scıps] rather than [scifs], although these are not really sound changes and affect words differently. It's more likely to happen in say Pepsi than in native words. Compounds such as skipstjóri 'captain' are more likely to retain the [f] than the simple words.
Höggmæli: b, d, g > [ʔ] before n so höfn 'harbor' [hœʔn] rather than [hœpn]
Frication of k before n: læknir 'doctor' [laixnır] rather than [laihknır]
Loss of phonemic voiceless n: hnútur 'knot' [nutʏr] rather than [n̥utʏr]
Intervocalic voicing of s: lesa 'read' [leɛːza] rather than [leɛːsa]
Then there's also various hypercorrections based on spelling such as [f] before s back to p: skips 'ship (gen.)' [scıps] rather than [scifs], although these are not really sound changes and affect words differently. It's more likely to happen in say Pepsi than in native words. Compounds such as skipstjóri 'captain' are more likely to retain the [f] than the simple words.
vec
Re: Recent Sound Changes
There's a lot of "recent" Finnish sound changes that just involve the reshuffling of dialectal features (d > ∅, n > ∅ / _#, etc.) but one apparently recent one I've noticed in my speech is a breaking of vowel harmony, of sorts. Apparently neutral or disharmonically-front feet now may take front-vocalic suffixes, even if a back-vocalic primarily stressed foot precedes. Some plural partitive examples:
ˈalkohoˌlisti : ˈalkohoˌlistejä (pro alkoholisteja)
ˈelektroˌlyysi : ˈelektroˌlyysejä (pro elektrolyyseja)
ˈkorisˌteinen : ˈkorisˌteisiä (pro koristeisia) 'decorated'
ˈohuˌempi : ˈohuˌempiä (pro ohuempia) 'thinner'
ˈalkohoˌlisti : ˈalkohoˌlistejä (pro alkoholisteja)
ˈelektroˌlyysi : ˈelektroˌlyysejä (pro elektrolyyseja)
ˈkorisˌteinen : ˈkorisˌteisiä (pro koristeisia) 'decorated'
ˈohuˌempi : ˈohuˌempiä (pro ohuempia) 'thinner'
[ˌʔaɪsəˈpʰɻ̊ʷoʊpɪɫ ˈʔæɫkəɦɔɫ]