Neogrammarian vs. other sound change

[Sally Thomason]

But I don't think Brian's approach will work to solve the problem
Andrew raises.  Years ago, when for some reason I read Yakov
Malkiel's 1976 Language paper on a minor sound change in Spanish
("for some reason" because I am not a Romance specialist and Malkiel
is not easy to read), I realized that the whole question of phonetic
triggers of sound change is unanswered, for some or possibly even
most changes.  Malkiel's example was a case of monophthongization
that started in a diminutive suffix, where -ie- was replaced by -i-.
He showed that the change happened because of analogy -- ordinary
morphological analogy -- to two other diminutive suffixes that had a
monophthong -i-; the monophthongization change then spread to a
couple of inflectional verb suffixes.  Then it stopped: it didn't
become a regular sound change.  But clearly it *could* have done so:
monophthongization of diphthongs is common enough in regular sound
change, and the only reason we *know* that this minor Spanish sound
change had an analogic trigger is that it never progressed beyond a
handful of suffixes.  If it had progressed to completion,
monophthongizing all -ie- diphthongs to -i-, we would view it as a
nice regular Neogrammarian sound change (and probably even Malkiel
wouldn't have discovered the analogic source).  

In other words, even with phonetically reasonable sound changes, I
don't think it's safe to assume that "phonetic factors are paramount"
at the onset of the change.  As we all know, many phonetically
natural changes fail to occur; we don't know why the ones that
do occur happen.  It's possible that nonphonetic factors are
frequently part of the trigger -- analogy in Malkiel's example,
social factors in some other instances, who knows what in still
others.

The Rhenish Fan shows that what looks like a coherent set of
perfectly regular changes didn't happen all at the same time, or even
in chunks in all words at the same time, in the westernmost region of
German-speaking territory.  Suppose the Rhenish Fan didn't exist, and
we had a completely regular (bundle of) isogloss(es) separating the
region where the High German Consonant Shift occurred from the region
where it didn't: wouldn't we view that as a quite ordinary example of
Neogrammarian sound change?  I think we would.  So I think it's very
difficult, and maybe impossible (given that we generally have zero
information about the earliest stage of a regular sound change) to
draw a sharp line between Neogrammarian sound change and other kinds
of sound change.  In some cases we can certainly point to
non-Neogrammarian change processes in sounds, of course.  But
excluding those processes doesn't, it seems to me, give us a reliable
criterion for identifying Neogrammarian sound changes before they've
completed their run and turned out to be regular.

  -- Sally Thomason
     Univ. of Michigan
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