Sound changes versus sound changes

[anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi]

[Steve Long]

These examples also bring us back to the original topic.

How many sound changes brought us from <*wixti> to /viisi/ and how long did
they take?  (I don't know what dates you feel comfortable with for last unity
of PU.)

[A.A.]

The first question can hardly be given a satisfactory answer. The *path* of
change was, according to the current knowledge of Uralic historical phonology,
*wixti > *wiiti > *viiti > *viic´i > /viisi/. But it's difficult or
impossible to say how many sound changes are involved in gradual developments
like the Proto-Finnic change *ti > *c´i > ?*s´i > si. Counting only changes
that affected phonological oppositions, there were only three changes (this
excludes also *w > *v). As for the second question, they probably took
something like 8000 years (but these isolated examples of course tell us
nothing about "the rate of change", whatever that is, in Finnic/Uralic).

[S.L.]

Now, <*wixti> to /yuq/ appears to either involve "more" sound changes or
changes that were more radical, in the sense that /yuq/ appears to diverge
more from /wixti/ than /viisi/ does.

[A.A.]

Yes - the path was PU *wixti > *wixtø > *wiøtø > *wüøtø >
[Proto-Samoyedic] *wüøt > *wüøq > *wüq > *w'uq > /yuq/.

[S.L.]

If I'm right about that (and I'm not sure I am), then there are two possible
factors that would be at work in evaluating "rate of change."

One is HOW MANY TIMES particular words in a language undergo phonological
change.  There could be a good number of shifts that in the end don't
necessarily travel that far from the original.  Think of first person
singulars in IE, if that's a good example.

[A.A.]

At least of earlier in this discussion, the issue was the "rate of change" in a
*language*, not in the phonological manifestations of some individual lexical
items. Are you suggesting that the rate of language change could be measured by
counting sound changes in individual words? And what "particular words" are you
referring to?

[S.L.]

The other factor is HOW "DISSIMILAR" those changes are, in the sense that you
used similar above, in "little or no similarity."  We're not talking about
"unexpected" or uncommon shifts here but rather shifts that make the words
sound significantly different.  In other words, a fricative to a labial
versus a fricative to another fricative. An ordinary listener might have a
better chance of finding a similarity in the latter than the former.

[A.A.]

I must ask: a similarity to what? My point, as far as there was one, was that
/viisi/, /öt/ and /yuq/ do not resemble each other at all.

[S.L.]

(snip)
<<PU *jïNsi ... Hungarian /íj/.... PU *wixti .... H. /öt/...>>

And these two examples bring up a related matter.   If "every language has
its own phonological system,"  then it might make sense to suggest that every
language has its own path of phonological change.  The amount of
"dissimilarity" might not be a matter of time but also of the quality of the
changes.  A single change may end up being more "dissimilar" than a whole
long series of modest changes.

[A.A.]

Yes, I of course agree - e.g., a change *w > *v obviously creates less
dissimilarity between cognates than a change *w > *q. But sound changes are
still cumulative, and thus a longer time produces more dissimilarity on
average.

[S.L.]

The Hungarian example also brings to mind the question of how much certain
changes seem just plain immeasurable.

[A.A.]

It is naturally impossible to "measure" dissimilarity, because the degree of
observed dissimilarity is dependent on subjective matters. Counting sound
changes is usually impossible in practice, because we face the problem of what
should be counted as a sound change. Moreover, all changes cannot be
reconstructed. Note that counting sound changes in *individual* word-forms is
irrelevant, if the "rate of change" of the *language* is to be measured.

[S.L.]

(snip)
And perhaps the phonological gap is a truer measure, if there is
any reliable measure at all.

[A.A.]

Ok, please tell me what exactly do you want to measure - The "rate of change"
of a language, or some subsystem or part of it, such as the phonological system
or the lexeme for 'five'? How could the level of phonological divergence in
individual cognate items be used as a measure of the rate of language change
*in general*?

[S.L.]

But I want to point out that there are equally members of that family that
appear not to have changed much at all.  In fact, the high convergence
percentages theorized by Dixon were meant to account for the large amount of
commonality between many of those languages.  As I understand it, those who
disagree with him about the degree of convergence have argued instead for a
high degree of conservatism in those Pama-Nyungan languages.  And that does
not mean that those languages did not change or even change a lot.  It's
rather that as much as they did change, they never change much.

[A.A.]

Larry already pointed out that it was *individual words* that had not changed
much, not entire languages. And examples of this type are easy to find: e.g.,
because of the unusually conservative nature of the Finnish vowel system, some
Proto-Uralic words are reflected in Finnish in an identical form, e.g. Finn.
kala 'fish' < PU *kala. But the fact remains that Finnish, as a whole, is as
different from Proto-Uralic as Spanish is from Proto-Indo-European.

[S.L.]

And, perhaps, even if some IE languages show a certain amount of "similarity"
in sound systems, it in no ways means they did not change for 3000 years
before attestation.  It may be that they changed often, but through all those
changes they never changed that much.

[A.A.]

Usually, we happen to know fairly exactly how those languages changed before
attestation, thanks to the comparative method. So that doesn't seem to leave
much room for this kind of speculation.

Regards,
Ante Aikio