rhotacism from Ray Hickey

[Larry Trask]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
On Fri, 6 Nov 1998, H.M.Hubey wrote:
 
> But in general I do not see any reason to assume that no sound
> change is reversible given enough time.
 
I assume we are speaking of phonological change, and not of things like
spelling pronunciation and the influence of prestige varieties.
 
That being so, certain sound changes are indeed reversible.  For
example, PIE */t/ generally changed to theta in Germanic, but this theta
has changed back to /t/ in the continental Scandinavian languages.  This
is `Rueckverwandlung', or `reversal'.  It is not particularly common.
 
But some sound changes are quite irreversible.  Consider loss.  In the
ancestor of Greek, prevocalic */s/ was lenited to /h/, and the resulting
/h/ was later lost.  I predict confidently that the Greeks will never
reverse this change by re-introducing those long-gone /s/s, since no
ordinary speaker has the faintest idea where the /s/s used to be, or
even that they were ever there at all.  And the spontaneous change of
nothing to /s/ is not something that has been observed very often, if
indeed ever at all.
 
Another type of irreversible change is merger.  Once accomplished, a
merger cannot be reversed by purely linguistic means -- though it *can*
sometimes be reversed by external means, such as by the influence of
another variety which has not undergone the merger.  For example, the
vowels of `toe' and `tow', and of `nose' and `knows', were formerly
distinct in English, but they have merged in all varieties except for
some rural areas of England (and Wales?).  Again, I am confident that
the merger cannot now be reversed.
 
> Right. However, it is strange on the other hand to see those
> consonant clusters and lack of vowels in languages like Abaza,
> Georgian, or Khoisan and its clicks. The foremost question is this:
> if there is such a universal trend (say toward lack of cases, or
> toward voicing, or from stops to fricatives, or approximants) how
> then did the language (any language) get those stops in the first
> place? Or how did some language get consonant clusters at all? HOw
> did a language get so many cases? Etc Etc.
 
Consonant clusters can and do arise from various sources.  Perhaps the
most frequent is the loss of intervening vowels.  For example, in the
English of southern England, `police' is pronounced /pli:s/, `collect'
is /klekt/, `correct' is /krekt/, `collapse' sounds like `claps', and so
on, producing many new instances of word-initial clusters.  In many
varieties of English, words like `camera', `chocolate' and `family' have
lost their medial vowels, and in England the same is true of `medicine',
which is /medsin/ -- all now with consonant clusters which were formerly
absent.
 
As is well known, similar things happen in French, in which <petit>
`small' is pronounced /pti/.  Pyrenean varieties of Basque have
undergone extensive syncope, so that common <zara> `you are'
(phonetically [sara]) becomes <zra>, <dira> `they are' becomes <dra>,
and so on, producing numerous initial and medial clusters which were
formerly absent from the language.
 
But there are other mechanisms, such as unpacking.  In some varieties of
Basque, the historical palatal nasal /n~/ has been unpacked into a
cluster /jn/, and in some varieties of French palatal /n~/ has been
unpacked into the cluster /nj/.
 
English has acquired some final clusters by excrescence: `vermin' to
regional `varmint', `no' to `nope', `amiddes' to `amidst', `betwix' to
`betwixt', and so on.  And note also cases like `empty' and `thunder',
whose /p/ and /d/ were formerly absent but have been inserted by
epenthesis, presumably to ease the transitions between unlike sounds.
 
The rise of cases has been much investigated.  Perhaps the single most
frequent source of new cases is the reduction of postpositional phrases.
For example, both Hungarian and Finnish have many more cases than can be
reconstructed for their Proto-Uralic ancestor, and the origins of many
of these cases are well understood: they derive from the reduction of
postpositional phrases.  In the same way, the Basque comitative
case-ending <-ekin> `with' derives from the reduction of a
postpositional phrase *<-en kidean> `in the company of'.
 
New plosives can arise by simple fortition.  For example, original /w/
has been strengthened to /b/ in some American languages, and the glide
/j/ (= English <y>) has been strengthened to a variety of fricatives,
affricates and plosives in many varieties of Basque, with some of these
being devoiced as well.  And some western varieties of Basque have
changed the sequence /ua/ first to [uwa] and then to [uba], acquiring
new instances of /b/ in the process.
 
But there are other sources of new plosives.  For example, Dutch /sx/
has been dissimilated to /sk/ in Afrikaans, resulting in new instances
of /k/.
 
So, all of the questions that Mark asks are interesting ones, but they
have answers which have been largely worked out in the only way
possible: by looking at the evidence.
 
Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK
 
larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk