In
historical linguistics
Historical linguistics, also known as diachronic linguistics, is the scientific study of how languages change over time. It seeks to understand the nature and causes of linguistic change and to trace the evolution of languages. Historical li ...
, transphonologization (also known as rephonologization or cheshirization, see
below
Below may refer to:
*Earth
*Ground (disambiguation)
*Soil
*Floor
* Bottom (disambiguation)
*Less than
*Temperatures below freezing
*Hell or underworld
People with the surname
* Ernst von Below (1863–1955), German World War I general
* Fred Belo ...
) is a type of
sound change
In historical linguistics, a sound change is a change in the pronunciation of a language. A sound change can involve the replacement of one speech sound (or, more generally, one phonetic feature value) by a different one (called phonetic chan ...
whereby a
phonemic contrast
Phonemic contrast refers to a minimal phonetic difference, that is, small differences in speech sounds, that makes a difference in how the sound is perceived by listeners, and can therefore lead to different mental lexical entries for words. ...
that used to involve a certain
feature
Feature may refer to:
Computing
* Feature recognition, could be a hole, pocket, or notch
* Feature (computer vision), could be an edge, corner or blob
* Feature (machine learning), in statistics: individual measurable properties of the phenome ...
X evolves in such a way that the contrast is preserved, yet becomes associated with a different feature Y.
For example, a language contrasting two words * vs. * may evolve historically so that final
consonant
In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract, except for the h sound, which is pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Examples are and pronou ...
s are dropped, yet the modern language preserves the contrast through the nature of the
vowel
A vowel is a speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract, forming the nucleus of a syllable. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness a ...
, as in a pair vs. . Such a situation would be described by saying that a former contrast between
oral
The word oral may refer to:
Relating to the mouth
* Relating to the mouth, the first portion of the alimentary canal that primarily receives food and liquid
**Oral administration of medicines
** Oral examination (also known as an oral exam or ora ...
and
nasal consonant
In phonetics, a nasal, also called a nasal occlusive or nasal stop in contrast with an oral stop or nasalized consonant, is an occlusive consonant produced with a lowered velum, allowing air to escape freely through the nose. The vast majo ...
s has been ''transphonologized'' into a contrast between
oral and nasal vowels.
The term ''transphonologization'' was coined by
André-Georges Haudricourt
André-Georges Haudricourt (; 17 January 1911 – 20 August 1996) was a French botanist, anthropologist and linguist.
Biography
He grew up on his parents' farm, in a remote area of Picardy. From his early childhood, he was curious about technol ...
. The concept was defined and amply illustrated by Hagège & Haudricourt; it has been mentioned by several followers of
panchronic phonology, and beyond.
Resulting in a new contrast on vowels
Umlaut
A common example of transphonologization is
umlaut.
;Germanic
In many
Germanic languages
The Germanic languages are a branch of the Indo-European languages, Indo-European language family spoken natively by a population of about 515 million people mainly in Europe, North America, Oceania, and Southern Africa. The most widely spoke ...
around 500–700 AD, a sound change fronted a back vowel when an or followed in the next syllable. Typically, the or was then lost, leading to a situation where a trace of the original or remains in the fronted quality of the preceding vowel. Alternatively, a distinction formerly expressed through the presence or absence of an or suffix was then re-expressed as a distinction between a front or back vowel.
As a specific instance of this, in prehistoric
Old English
Old English ( or , or ), or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the Early Middle Ages. It developed from the languages brought to Great Britain by Anglo-S ...
, a certain class of nouns was marked by an suffix in the (nominative) plural, but had no suffix in the (nominative) singular. A word like "mouse", for example, had a plural "mice". After umlaut, the plural became pronounced , where the long back vowel was fronted, producing a new subphonemic front-rounded vowel , which serves as a secondary indicator of plurality. Subsequent loss of final , however, made a
phoneme
A phoneme () is any set of similar Phone (phonetics), speech sounds that are perceptually regarded by the speakers of a language as a single basic sound—a smallest possible Phonetics, phonetic unit—that helps distinguish one word fr ...
and the primary indicator of plurality, leading to a distinction between "mouse" and "mice". In this case, the lost sound left a trace in the presence of ; or equivalently, the distinction between singular and plural, formerly expressed through a suffix , has been re-expressed using a different feature, namely the front–back distinction of the main vowel. This distinction survives in the modern forms "mouse" and "mice" , although the specifics have been modified by the
Great Vowel Shift
The Great Vowel Shift was a series of English phonology, pronunciation changes in the vowels of the English language that took place primarily between the 1400s and 1600s (the transition period from Middle English to Early Modern English), begi ...
.
;Outside Germanic
Similar phenomena have been described in languages outside Germanic.
* Seventeen
Austronesian
Austronesian may refer to:
*The Austronesian languages
*The historical Austronesian peoples
The Austronesian people, sometimes referred to as Austronesian-speaking peoples, are a large group of peoples who have settled in Taiwan, maritime Sout ...
languages of northern Vanuatu have gone through a process whereby former *CVCV
disyllable
A syllable is a basic unit of organization within a sequence of speech sounds, such as within a word, typically defined by linguists as a ''nucleus'' (most often a vowel) with optional sounds before or after that nucleus (''margins'', which are ...
s lost their final vowel, yet preserved their contrast through the creation of new vowels: e.g.
Proto-Oceanic
Proto-Oceanic (abbreviated as POc) is a proto-language that comparative linguistics, historical linguists since Otto Dempwolff have reconstructed as the hypothetical common ancestor of the Oceanic languages, Oceanic subgroup of the Austronesian ...
*paRi "stingray" and *paRu "hibiscus" transphonologized to and in
Mwesen
Mwesen (formerly known by its Mota name ''Mosina'') is an Oceanic language spoken in the southeastern area of Vanua Lava Island, in the Banks Islands of northern Vanuatu, by about 10 speakers. François (2012): 88).
Mwesen shows many similariti ...
. This resulted in the expansion of vowel inventories in the region, from an original five-vowel system (*a *e *i *o *u) to inventories ranging from 7 to 16 vowels (depending on the language).
Nasalization of vowels
* In French, a final sound disappeared, but left its trace in the
nasalization
In phonetics, nasalization (or nasalisation in British English) is the production of a sound while the velum is lowered, so that some air escapes through the nose during the production of the sound by the mouth. An archetypal nasal sound is .
...
of the
preceding vowel, as in ''vin blanc'' , from historical .
* In many languages (
Sino-Tibetan
Sino-Tibetan (also referred to as Trans-Himalayan) is a family of more than 400 languages, second only to Indo-European in number of native speakers. Around 1.4 billion people speak a Sino-Tibetan language. The vast majority of these are the 1.3 ...
,
Austroasiatic
The Austroasiatic languages ( ) are a large language family spoken throughout Mainland Southeast Asia, South Asia and East Asia. These languages are natively spoken by the majority of the population in Vietnam and Cambodia, and by minority popu ...
,
Oceanic
Oceanic may refer to:
*Of or relating to the ocean
*Of or relating to Oceania
**Oceanic climate
**Oceanic languages
**Oceanic person or people, also called "Pacific Islander(s)"
Places
* Oceanic, British Columbia, a settlement on Smith Island, ...
,
Celtic
Celtic, Celtics or Keltic may refer to:
Language and ethnicity
*pertaining to Celts, a collection of Indo-European peoples in Europe and Anatolia
**Celts (modern)
*Celtic languages
**Proto-Celtic language
*Celtic music
*Celtic nations
Sports Foot ...
…), a vowel was nasalized by the nasal consonant preceding it: this "historical transfer of nasality between consonantal onset and vowel" is a case of transphonologization.
Compensatory lengthening
* In
American English
American English, sometimes called United States English or U.S. English, is the set of variety (linguistics), varieties of the English language native to the United States. English is the Languages of the United States, most widely spoken lang ...
, the words ''rider'' and ''writer'' are pronounced with a instead of and as a result of
flapping
Flapping or tapping, also known as alveolar flapping, intervocalic flapping, or ''t''-voicing, is a phonological process involving a voiced alveolar tap or flap; it is found in many varieties of English, especially North American, Cardiff, Uls ...
. The distinction between the two words can, however, be preserved by (or transferred to) the length of the vowel (or in this case, diphthong), as vowels are pronounced longer before voiced consonants than before voiceless consonants. Also, the quality of the vowels may be affected.
Before disappearing, a sound may trigger or prevent some phonetic change in its vicinity that would not otherwise have occurred, and which may remain long afterward. For example:
* In the
English
English usually refers to:
* English language
* English people
English may also refer to:
Culture, language and peoples
* ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England
* ''English'', an Amish ter ...
word ''night, '' the sound (spelled ''gh'') disappeared, but before, or perhaps as it did so (see "
compensatory lengthening
Compensatory lengthening in phonology and historical linguistics is the lengthening of a vowel sound that happens upon the loss of a following consonant, usually in the syllable coda, or of a vowel in an adjacent syllable. Lengthening triggered ...
"), it lengthened the vowel , so that the word is pronounced "nite" rather than the "nit" that would otherwise be expected for a
closed syllable
A syllable is a basic unit of organization within a sequence of speech sounds, such as within a word, typically defined by linguists as a ''nucleus'' (most often a vowel) with optional sounds before or after that nucleus (''margins'', which are ...
.
* in
Hejazi Arabic's direct object pronoun, the ـُه sound at the end of words has disappeared, so that the contrast in the Classical Arabic (they said it) and (they said) became a contrast only between the vowels as (they said it) and (they said).
Tone languages
*The existence of
contrastive tone in modern languages often originates in transphonologization of earlier contrasts between consonants: e.g. a former contrast of consonant voicing (* vs. *) transphonologizes to a tonal contrast (* vs. *)
* The
tone split of
Chinese
Chinese may refer to:
* Something related to China
* Chinese people, people identified with China, through nationality, citizenship, and/or ethnicity
**Han Chinese, East Asian ethnic group native to China.
**'' Zhonghua minzu'', the supra-ethnic ...
, where the
voiced consonant
Voice or voicing is a term used in phonetics and phonology to characterize speech sounds (usually consonants). Speech sounds can be described as either voiceless (otherwise known as ''unvoiced'') or voiced.
The term, however, is used to refe ...
s present in
Middle Chinese
Middle Chinese (formerly known as Ancient Chinese) or the Qieyun system (QYS) is the historical variety of Chinese language, Chinese recorded in the ''Qieyun'', a rime dictionary first published in 601 and followed by several revised and expande ...
lowered the
tone
Tone may refer to:
Visual arts and color-related
* Tone (color theory), a mix of tint and shade, in painting and color theory
* Tone (color), the lightness or brightness (as well as darkness) of a color
* Toning (coin), color change in coins
* ...
of a syllable and subsequently lost their voicing in many varieties.
*
Floating tone
A floating tone is a morpheme or element of a morpheme that contains neither consonants nor vowels, but only tone. It cannot be pronounced by itself but affects the tones of neighboring morphemes.
An example occurs in Bambara, a Mande language ...
s are generally the remains of entire disappeared syllables.
Resulting in a new contrast on consonants
*
Consonant mutation
Consonant mutation is change in a consonant in a word according to its morphological or syntactic environment.
Mutation occurs in languages around the world. A prototypical example of consonant mutation is the initial consonant mutation of al ...
in
Celtic languages
The Celtic languages ( ) are a branch of the Indo-European language family, descended from the hypothetical Proto-Celtic language. The term "Celtic" was first used to describe this language group by Edward Lhuyd in 1707, following Paul-Yve ...
(a lost vowel triggered initial consonant
lenition
In linguistics, lenition is a sound change that alters consonants, making them "weaker" in some way. The word ''lenition'' itself means "softening" or "weakening" (from Latin 'weak'). Lenition can happen both synchronically (within a language ...
, and a lost nasal triggered nasalization).
* In
Sanskrit
Sanskrit (; stem form ; nominal singular , ,) is a classical language belonging to the Indo-Aryan languages, Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. It arose in northwest South Asia after its predecessor languages had Trans-cultural ...
, the sequence ''*-Vžd-'' became retroflexed and lengthened to ''-V̄ḍ-'', e.g.
Proto-Indo-European
Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European language family. No direct record of Proto-Indo-European exists; its proposed features have been derived by linguistic reconstruction from documented Indo-Euro ...
''*nizdós'' ("nest") →
Proto-Indo-Iranian
Proto-Indo-Iranian, also called Proto-Indo-Iranic or Proto-Aryan, is the reconstructed proto-language of the Indo-Iranian branch of Indo-European. Its speakers, the hypothetical Proto-Indo-Iranians, are assumed to have lived in the late 3rd ...
''*niždás'' →
Sanskrit
Sanskrit (; stem form ; nominal singular , ,) is a classical language belonging to the Indo-Aryan languages, Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. It arose in northwest South Asia after its predecessor languages had Trans-cultural ...
''nīḍáḥ''.
* In
Makassarese and
Berau,
Proto-Malayo-Polynesian
Proto-Malayo-Polynesian (PMP) is the reconstructed ancestor of the Malayo-Polynesian languages, which is by far the largest branch (by current speakers) of the Austronesian language family. Proto-Malayo-Polynesian is ancestral to all Austronesia ...
schwa phoneme ''*ə'' geminates the following consonant but merges to ''a'' (Makassarese ''*bəli'' → ''*bəlli'' → ''balli'' "to buy, price", compare Indonesian ''beli'').
Other examples
* The prevention of sound change by a lost consonant in
Lahu;
* In
Estonian
Estonian may refer to:
* Something of, from, or related to Estonia, a country in the Baltic region in northern Europe
* Estonians, people from Estonia, or of Estonian descent
* Estonian language
* Estonian cuisine
* Estonian culture
See also ...
and some other
Uralic languages
The Uralic languages ( ), sometimes called the Uralian languages ( ), are spoken predominantly in Europe and North Asia. The Uralic languages with the most native speakers are Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian. Other languages with speakers ab ...
, when case endings are elided, the changed root indicates the presence of the case, see
consonant gradation
Consonant gradation is a type of consonant mutation (mostly lenition but also assimilation) found in some Uralic languages, more specifically in the Finnic, Samic and Samoyedic branches. It originally arose as an allophonic alternation ...
.
Other names
Rephonologization was a term used by
Roman Jakobson
Roman Osipovich Jakobson (, ; 18 July 1982) was a Russian linguist and literary theorist. A pioneer of structural linguistics, Jakobson was one of the most celebrated and influential linguists of the twentieth century. With Nikolai Trubetzk ...
(1931
972
Year 972 ( CMLXXII) was a leap year starting on Monday of the Julian calendar.
Events
By place
Byzantine Empire
* Spring – Emperor John I Tzimiskes divides the Bulgarian territories, recently held by the Kievan Rus', into six ...
to refer to essentially the same process but failed to catch on because of its ambiguity. In a 1994 paper,
Norman
Norman or Normans may refer to:
Ethnic and cultural identity
* The Normans, a people partly descended from Norse Vikings who settled in the territory of Normandy in France in the 9th and 10th centuries
** People or things connected with the Norma ...
(1994) used it again in the context of a proposed
Old Chinese
Old Chinese, also called Archaic Chinese in older works, is the oldest attested stage of Chinese language, Chinese, and the ancestor of all modern varieties of Chinese. The earliest examples of Chinese are divinatory inscriptions on oracle bones ...
sound change that transferred a distinction formerly expressed through putative
pharyngealization
Pharyngealization is a secondary articulation of consonants or vowels by which the pharynx or epiglottis is constricted during the articulation of the sound.
IPA symbols
In the International Phonetic Alphabet, pharyngealization can be indicate ...
of the initial consonant of a syllable to one expressed through presence or absence of a palatal glide before the main vowel of the syllable. However, ''rephonologization'' is occasionally used with another meaning, referring to changes such as the
Germanic sound shift or the Slavic change from to , where the phonological relationships among sounds change but the number of phonemes stays the same. That can be viewed as a special case of the broader process being described here.
James Matisoff
James Alan Matisoff ( zh, , t=馬蒂索夫, s=马蒂索夫, p=Mǎdìsuǒfū or zh, , t=馬提索夫, s=马提索夫, p=Mǎtísuǒfū; born July 14, 1937) is an American linguist. He is a professor emeritus of linguistics at the University of Cal ...
(1991:443) coined cheshirization as a synonym for transphonologization. The term jokingly refers to the
Cheshire Cat
The Cheshire Cat ( ) is a fictional cat popularised by Lewis Carroll in ''Alice's Adventures in Wonderland'' and known for its distinctive mischievous grin. While now most often used in ''Alice''-related contexts, the association of a "Chesh ...
, a character in the book ''
Alice in Wonderland
''Alice's Adventures in Wonderland'' (also known as ''Alice in Wonderland'') is an 1865 English Children's literature, children's novel by Lewis Carroll, a mathematics university don, don at the University of Oxford. It details the story of a ...
'', who "vanished quite slowly, beginning with the end of the tail, and ending with the grin, which remained some time after the rest of it had gone".
Lewis Carroll
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (27 January 1832 – 14 January 1898), better known by his pen name Lewis Carroll, was an English author, poet, mathematician, photographer and reluctant Anglicanism, Anglican deacon. His most notable works are ''Alice ...
, ''Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
''Alice's Adventures in Wonderland'' (also known as ''Alice in Wonderland'') is an 1865 English Children's literature, children's novel by Lewis Carroll, a mathematics university don, don at the University of Oxford. It details the story of a ...
''
1866 edition
page 93
''Cheshirization'' has been used by some other authors (e.g.
John McWhorter
John Hamilton McWhorter V (; born October 6, 1965) is an American linguist. He is an associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University, where he also teaches American studies and music history. He has authored a number of books on race ...
in McWhorter 2005, and
Hilary Chappell
Hilary Chappell(曹茜蕾) is a professor of linguistics at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS) in Paris. Her research focuses on grammaticalization and the typology of the Sinitic languages.
Biography
Chappell gra ...
in Chappell 2006).
Notes
References
*
Chappell, Hilary. 2006,
Language contact and areal diffusion in Sinitic languages" In ''Areal diffusion and genetic inheritance: problems in comparative linguistics''. Aleksandra Aikhenvald & Robert M. W. Dixon, eds. Oxford University Press, p. 344.
*
Dahl, Östen, 2004, ''The Growth and Maintenance of Linguistic Complexity. '' John Benjamins, p. 170.
*
* .
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
Matisoff, James, 1991, "Areal and universal dimensions of grammatization in Lahu." In ''Approaches to grammaticalization'', Traugott & Heine, eds. John Benjamins, pp. 383–453.
*
*
McWhorter, John H., 2005,
Defining Creole', Oxford University Press, pp. 12–13.
*
{{Wiktionary, transphonologization, cheshirization, rephonologization
Historical linguistics
Linguistic morphology
Neologisms
Phonology