- Cheshirization
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Sound change and alternation Fortition CheshirizationDissimilation Other types
Cheshirisation, or cheshirization, is a term coined by James Matisoff to refer to a type of sound change where a trace remains of a sound that has otherwise disappeared from a word. The term is a neologism, i.e. it is not an established scientific term. It is used here to describe a process that is real but so far has no generally accepted name. The term rephonologization has sometimes been used to describe this process; see below.
Essentially, a distinction between two sets of words that was formerly expressed through one phonological feature (e.g. a particular sound) is preserved (or partly preserved) through being re-expressed using a different phonological feature. This typically occurs through two sound changes: One that introduces a modification of some sort, conditioned on the presence or absence of a particular feature, followed by another change that deletes or changes the conditioning feature.
A common example is Germanic umlaut. In many Germanic languages around 500–700 AD, a sound change fronted a back vowel when an /i/ or /j/ followed in the next syllable. Typically, the /i/ or /j/ was then lost, leading to a situation where a trace of the original /i/ or /j/ remains in the fronted quality of the preceding vowel. Alternatively, a distinction formerly expressed through the presence or absence of an /i/ or /j/ suffix was then re-expressed as a distinction between a front or back vowel.
As a specific instance of this, in prehistoric Old English, a certain class of nouns was marked by an /i/ suffix in the (nominative) plural, but had no suffix in the (nominative) singular. A word like /muːs/ "mouse", for example, had a plural /muːsi/ "mice". After umlaut, the plural became pronounced [myːsi], where the long back vowel /uː/ was fronted, producing a new subphonemic front-rounded vowel [yː], which serves as a secondary indicator of plurality. Subsequent loss of final /i/, however, made /yː/ a phoneme and the primary indicator of plurality, leading to a distinction between /muːs/ "mouse" and /myːs/ "mice". In this case, the lost sound /i/ left a trace in the presence of /yː/; or equivalently, the distinction between singular and plural, formerly expressed through a suffix /i/, has been re-expressed using a different feature, namely the front-back distinction of the main vowel.
Contents
Examples
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 word night, the gh sound disappeared, but before or perhaps as it did so it lengthened the vowel i, so that the word is pronounced /ˈnaɪt/ "nite" rather than the /ˈnɪt/ "nit" that would otherwise be expected for a closed syllable.
- In French, a final n sound disappeared, but left its trace in the nasalization of the preceding vowel, as in vin blanc [vɛ̃ blɑ̃], from historical [vin blank].
Other examples:
- consonant mutation in Celtic languages (a lost vowel triggered initial consonant lenition, and a lost nasal triggered nasalisation);
- the prevention of sound change by a lost consonant in Lahu;
- floating tones, which are the remains of entire disappeared syllables;
- and the tone split of Chinese languages, where voiced consonants lowered the tone of a syllable and subsequently lost their voicing.
- In the Estonian language, when case endings are elided, the changed root indicates the presence of the case.
Other names
In a 1994 paper, Norman used the term rephonologization to refer to the same type of process, in the context of a proposed Old Chinese sound change that transferred a distinction formerly expressed through putative pharyngealization of the initial consonant of a syllable to one expressed through presence or absence of a palatal glide /j/ before the main vowel of the syllable.[1] Note that rephonologization is occasionally used with another meaning[2], referring to changes such as the Germanic sound shift or the Slavic change from /ɡ/ to /ɦ/, where the phonological relationships among sounds change but the number of phonemes stays the same. This can be viewed as a special case of the broader process being described here.
Notes
- ^ Norman, Jerry (July–September 1994). "Pharyngealization in Early Chinese". Journal of the American Oriental Society 114: 397–408. Specifically, the glide /j/ occurred whenever the initial consonant was not pharyngealized.
- ^ Trask, R.L. (1995). A Dictionary of Phonetics and Phonology. Routledge. ISBN 978-0415112611.
References
- James Matisoff, 1991, "Areal and universal dimensions of grammatization in Lahu." In Approaches to grammaticalization, Traugott & Heine, eds. John Benjamins, pp 383–453.
- Östen Dahl, 2004, The Growth and Maintenance of Linguistic Complexity. John Benjamins, p. 170.
- Hilary Chapell, 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.
- John H. McWhorter, Defining Creole, Oxford University Press, p. 12-13.
See also
- Historical linguistics
- Nasalization
- Tonogenesis
- Floating tone
Categories:- Phonology
- Linguistic morphology
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