Phonetic change

A phonetic change is any change in the phonetic-phonological level of a language, consisting of altering the articulation of a certain phoneme. A phonetic change can be:

• Purely phonetic if the basic inventory of fonemas of the tongue is unaltered and simply some fonemas receive a different joint than usual before the change.
• Fonological if the basic fonemas inventory is altered, either because contrasts are lost and therefore the number of seals is reduced, or because new relevant contrasts appear, which increases the number of seals.

The term phonetic change is also used to designate the process by which a language alters its phonological system over time. This process is a part of what we know as linguistic change, the universal and inevitable process by which languages change over time and by which language stages of different epochs can lose intelligibility with each other.

Conditional or systematic changes

They occur in certain fixed contexts and are not randomly distributed. They are often produced as a result of the influence of other adjacent sounds.

Assimilation

It is a process by which a phoneme or sound acquires phonetic features that make it more similar to an adjacent or close phoneme or group of phonemes, that is, it "assimilates" to this phoneme or group of phonemes. Among the multiple forms of assimilation we find sonorization, deafening, nasalization, labialization, velarization, etc.

Differentiation

Dissimilation

For dissimilation of aspirated consonants, see Grassmann's Law

Action exerted by a sound on another of the same word, with which it has all or some common articulatory elements, which consists of making it lose these common features: carcerce > jail. It can even make them disappear: aratru > plow. If it is a syllable that disappears, the phenomenon is called haplology.

Metathesis

It is the change of place of one or more sounds within a word. It responds to the need to make the pronunciation of the word easier: crocodile > crocodile. Although in many cases the formal reasons why the form with metathesis is easier than the form without metathesis are not clear.

If the sound that moves maintains contact with the sound that is etymologically grouped: it is a contact metathesis. If two sounds change their respective places it is a double or reciprocal metathesis: PERÍCULU > *periglo > peligro, PARABLE > *parabla > palabra, or MIRACULU > *miraglo > milagro.

Spontaneous or non-systematic changes

Occurring randomly and affecting particular words, they are generally considered subject to historical accidents and various fashions. In the process of linguistic change they constitute only a part of the observed phonetic changes.

Formal notation used to specify phonetic changes

A statement of the form_

A  B (o /A/ /2005 /B/)

should be read as "A changes to B", "A is replaced by B" or "A is reflected as B". Element A is usually interpreted as the form of an entity in an earlier stage of the language and B as the form appearing in more recent stages. The related notation:

B. A (or /B/ A/)

is understood as "[latest form] B derives from [oldest form] A". For example:

POc. /*t/  Rot. /f/

is interpreted as the Proto-Oceanic form /*t/ (the asterisk indicates that it is a reconstructed form) giving rise to the form /f/ in Rotuman. Or the more familiar:

lat. /f-/ /2005 esp. /h-/ ante /a/

is interpreted as the initial f- of Latin giving rise to h- in Spanish before the phoneme /a/.

Both members of these "A > B" or "B < A" they only indicate the starting point and the end point of the change and do not imply that there are other intermediate stages. For example in the case of the proto-oceanic example it is known that the complete sequence of changes was /*t/ > /θ/ > /f/, whereas in certain contexts Spanish went through the lat. /f-/ > esp. mediaeval /ɸ/ > esp. /h-/).

When the change is conditioned and occurs only in a particular phonological context, the notation can be extended:

A  B /X_Y

which is interpreted as n#34;A changes to B when preceded by X and followed by Y". For example:

lat. [b] . [β] /[+vocálico]_[+vocálico], which can be simplified as

lat. [b] /2005 esp. [β] /V_V (where V denotes any vocable sound)

Either of these two rules (inherited from Latin) are interpreted as meaning that the Latin [b] sounds placed between vowels gave rise in Spanish to words articulated with the sound [β] (for example: caballum, dēbet > [kaˈβaʝo] (horse), [ˈdeβe] ([he] must),

Neogrammatic principles of phonetic change

The systematic study of phonetic change reached scientific heights with the Newogrammatic school in the mid century XIX. The authors of this school found that the phonetic change followed certain patterns or regularities, which sometimes even allowed themselves to be formulated in the form of "phonetic laws". The neogrammarians established a series of universal principles in linguistic changes. Nowadays it is considered that said "principles" they do not constitute "laws" inviolable but rather facts or statistical trends that are fulfilled to a high degree, but could admit exceptions. The principles of linguistic change within the neogrammar school approach are:

• The phonetic change has no memory: That is, the process of phonetic change only depends on the current state or form of a word, and does not depend on the origin or previous form of that word. More formally if in a language there is a convergence of X and Y to Z, i.e., X, Y  Z, then no successive change affecting Z can distinguish whether that Z came from X or Y.
• Language change is blind to grammar: That is, a linguistic change can only depend on phonetic traits and not on the meaning or grammatical function of that word. Therefore the only conditions or restrictions affecting the changes are of a phenological and non grammatical or semantic type. For example, if within a given context, for example in in an accentuated syllable, the change is given X  Z, that change should affect all the syllables, and it could not be that it affected adjectives and not verbs, for example; since the difference between verb and adjective is grammatical and non-phonological. This principle is limited by the effects of analogous regularization on certain inflexions, but it can be argued that here there is a border of morphism that would be a phenological restriction.
• The phonetic change is regular and has no exception
• The phonetic change is inexorable

Criticism of the neogrammatic approach

Some linguists came to the conclusion that the progress of phonetic change is gradual, and occurs by progressive lexical diffusion, from word to word. For this reason, in certain cases and temporarily it would occur in certain words and not in others, admitting certain phonetic changes as exceptions. This factor of gradualness was not originally considered by neogrammatical theorists. However, the most common position currently is that there is both lexical diffusion and regular change, one or the other being more common depending on the type of phonetic change.

Furthermore, language change differs from generation to generation. Certain changes are detected among younger speakers but not among older ones, or it may be more widespread among women than among men. These sociolinguistic factors were not considered until sociolinguistic research provided sufficient diachronic data in the early 20th century.