Sound changes versus sound changes

[X99Lynx at aol.com]

I wrote:
> 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.

In a message dated 7/7/01 7:23:32 AM, rao.3 at osu.edu writes:

<< But sound changes don't seem to work that way. Labov, in his monograph
about sound changes, looked at various examples of changes in progress and
came to the conclusion that changes of place are more complex than changes of
effort and such things at metathesis can remain partial, limited by semantics
etc. So p>f may be a smaller change than f > th. >>

Well, even if there are "paths of change", there still is the matter of how
"dissimilar" a listener perceives one sound change or set of changes to be
versus another.

Take, for example, where a dialect adopts a change that moves it towards
unintelligability in the ears of speakers of another dialect of the same
language.  Some changes are going to make words harder to recognize than
others.  And that would be a measure of "dissimilarity" that doesn't have to
do with the speaker, but rather with the listener.  (On Hatteras Island, some
words spoken by locals are understandable even though they are spoken
differently.  But some words are spoken so differently that it is difficult
to guess what they are equivalent to in New York speech.  Expectation does
not feel like a good explanation for this.  It seems to be more a matter of
the degree of difference in sounds.)

I would imagine that some paths that are "natural" may produce more
"dissimilarity" in the ears of the listener than other natural paths.

With regard to the same Labov work - I think - Benji Ward wrote something
interesting in connection with his comments on t > h that I posted earlier.
And this has to do with Labov's apparent approach to the "unusual or
unexpected" sound change (as opposed to the "dissimilar" ones I'm talking
about here.)  He wrote:

"In this context, Labov's (1994) book on paths of changes in vowel systems
implicitly dismisses such a question by illustrating the various routes that
vocalic chain shifts can take, e.g., whether the highest back vowel fronts or
whether it diphthongises and heads for /aw/...

No explanation for alternative paths is given, and the principles given imply
that asking why one path occurs more commonly than another is devoid of
linguistic interest.  This is not yet obvious for "unusual sound changes",
but these seem to be changes in consonants, not vowels, so the implications
of Labov's study may be more restricted...."

In this connection, it's pertinent to ask how dissimilar do Latin, Greek and
Sanskrit "sound?"  Not as a matter of morphology or divergence from a
proto-language, but measured against each other in terms of intelligibility.
In other words, how far away from Latin does Greek "sound" as opposed to
Sanskrit?  And is it proper to measure the difference in sounds based on
"changes of effort" or degree of unintelligibility?  On this list mutual
comprehension is commonly used as an argument for a certain rate of change in
IE languages.  Can rate of change be correlated to relative intelligibility?

Regards,
Steve Long