This paper considers vṛddhi as an inherited feature in Modern Standard Hindi. As a phenomenon, vṛddhi is most commonly discussed in reference to Old Indo‐Aryan (OIA), particularly with a focus on inflectional patterns in Sanskrit. However, the inherited pattern in New Indo‐Aryan (NIA) languages presents specific analytical challenges and its status as a morpho‐phonological...
This paper investigates an apparent gap in the distribution of nasal + stop clusters, as well as certain aspects of the diachronic emergence of this gap, in Latin and Hungarian. The phenomenon investigated is the absence of a frequent consonant cluster ([nt] in Latin, [ŋk] in Hungarian) from a position at the end of verb stems. An important property of the missing consonant...
This paper confronts and resolves the problem of apparent exceptions to the constraint prohibiting the co-occurrence of identical consonants in both syllable margins of the PIE root: schematically, †… Ci … E … Ci …, where † indicates the prohibition of the root structure following it, Ci = the identical consonant, E = the ablauting vowel, and … = optional additional consonants in...
English is not typically considered to be a vowel harmony language, and yet one of its cousins, Buchan Scots, clearly shows vowel-harmonic patterns. This involves a type of height harmony which is blocked by certain consonants and consonant clusters (which do not form a natural class). The front vowel /ɪ/ has historically functioned as a high vowel but seems to have changed into...
Some sound changes seem to proceed at different rates depending on lexical frequency; these are often interpreted as reflecting phonetically detailed exemplar memories, with changes spreading via lexical diffusion (Pierrehumbert 2002; Bybee 2012). However, such patterns do not necessarily require word-specific phonetic details. Variation associated with lexical frequency also...
The popularity of computational methods in historical linguistics has primarily been motivated by mere access to the new methods themselves, rather than by looking for tools to solve problems. Investigators have looked for problems with which to showcase their tools. This dynamic is one reason why eye‐catching but long solved problems, such as the homeland of the Indo‐Europeans...
We report the results of a qualitative and quantitative lexical comparison between Bangime and neighboring languages. Our results indicate that the status of the language as an isolate remains viable, and that Bangime speakers have had different levels of language contact with other Malian populations at various points throughout their history. Bangime speakers, the Bangande...
In this article, we offer a historical account of the development of two phonemic ‘interior’ vowels, [ə] and [ɤ], and heterosyllabic vowel sequences in Ngwi, a virtually undescribed West-Coastal Bantu language spoken in the western part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. While interior vowels phonologized due to the loss of their conditioning environment, most...
There is a widely accepted chronology of sound laws, covering the transition from Proto-West Germanic to Old English, found in every handbook of Old English. This chronology contains sound laws whose only function is to cancel the effects of previous ones, such as ‘retraction’ and ‘smoothing’, reversing ‘fronting’ and ‘breaking’. This chronology of sound laws is allocated to the...
This study provides a historical typological Optimality Theoretic analysis of the treatment of potential super-heavy syllables in six Arabic varieties: Hijazi, Egyptian, Emirati, Kuwaiti, Algerian, and Palestinian. The analysis in this study uses the same violable OT constraints for all languages, and the differences between the grammars are represented by the order in which the...
The question of what types of units and domains are needed in order to capture phonological change is a reasonable one to ask. To answer this question, however, we first need to properly define how we understand phonological change, and the definition that we adopt for that clearly depends on the phonological framework that is assumed. I consider several influential frameworks...
Recent conjectural morphological (‘word family’) approaches to early Chinese assign the aspirated causative verbs of the Mǐn group to Jerry Norman’s comparatively reconstructed Proto-Mǐn voiced aspirated *Dʰ-, proposing on this basis that *Dʰ- reflects prefixation of Old Chinese provenance. In this article, I argue that comparative phonological work on Mǐn has never suggested *Dʰ...
The full historical trajectory of voseo (second plural) forms becoming (deferent) second singular forms — as in Latin vos amātis (2pl) > Medieval Spanish vos amádes (2sg formal) — is a central chapter in the history of Spanish. In many Latin-American Spanish vernaculars, classical voseo fused with the original tuteo, giving rise to a new neutral address paradigm, voseo tuteante...
Perceptual learning is when listeners hear novel speech input and shift their subsequent perceptual behavior. In this paper we consider the relationship between sound change and perceptual learning. We spell out the connections we see between perceptual learning and different approaches to sound change and explain how a deeper empirical understanding of the properties of...
This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of the phonotactics of syllable rhymes based on all unique tokens in two Early Old French texts. Based on the data from this single, conservative variety, I develop Jacobs’ (1994) proposal that the Old French stress rule is underlyingly trochaic and that word-fiinal stress is caused by the presence of an empty-headed final syllable. I...
This paper discusses a postulated non-sound change-based development derived from the detection of an exception to a regular segmental correspondence and shows how this proposal receives independent support from internal etymologization within the domain of kinship terms. The affricate in the Proto-Mojeño etymon *-ótse ‘grandmother’ is hypothesized to derive from affective...
Vowel harmony involves the systematic correspondence between vowels in some domain for some phonological feature. Though harmony represents one of the most natural and diachronically robust phonological phenomena that occurs in human language, how and why harmony systems emerge and decay over time remains unclear. Specifically, what motivates harmony decay and the pathways by...
This paper discusses a putative sound change in the early history of Latin and synchronic alternations apparently related to it. The lowering of short high vowels before the rhotic is problematic on several counts; so much so that serious doubt has been cast on its reality. On the other hand, due to widespread alternations in the morphophonology of Classical Latin it is...
This article revisits, extends and interrogates the position advocated in Honeybone (2019) — that phonotactic constraints are psychologically real phonological entities (namely: constraints on output-like forms), which have a diachrony of their own, and which can also interfere with diachronic segmental change by inhibiting otherwise regular innovations. I focus in the latter...
This paper investigates how prosody is hidden behind transcriptions in historical resources. Three historical sources are used in the analysis. They are Chinese transcriptions from the 15th century in which Japanese, Korean and Ryukyuan phrases are recorded using Chinese characters. The argument concentrates on the prosodic patterns of disyllabic nouns in the three historical...
This paper documents historical labiodentalization to [f] in one subvariety of Faifi Arabic (FA), which has not been previously detailed. In this subvariety, spoken in southwestern Saudi Arabia, the sound cognate with the Classical Arabic voiced emphatic (i.e. pharyngealized) dental stop *dˤ (typically realized as [ðˤ] in many Saudi varieties) has the voiceless labiodental reflex...
Although it is well‐known to most historical linguists that the comparative method could in principle be used to predict hitherto unobserved words in genetically related languages, the task of word prediction is rarely discussed in the linguistic literature. Here, we introduce
The low-mid unrounded front vowel /ɛː/ in German (as in Bären) has been subject to change since Old High German. It slowly merged with the high-mid unrounded front vowel /eː/, but a reversal seems to have emerged recently. This paper investigates both historical and current change of the Bären vowel. Historical change is investigated through literature-based research; current...
Vowels are longer before voiced than voiceless obstruents in many languages. Work on how this effect interacts with aspiration has been limited. This study presents data from Hindi and Telugu on vowel duration and other acoustic characteristics as influenced by following consonants. Hindi vowels were significantly longer before voiced stops than voiceless stops, with no...
This paper examines the development of the Old Irish diphthongs */ai/, */oi/, */ui/ in later varieties of the Gaelic languages. These are generally accepted to have merged as a single phoneme by the end of the Old Irish period (c. 900). In all modern varieties the regular reflex of this phoneme is a long monophthong, represented orthographically as <ao>. There are three main...