{"id":160,"date":"2018-09-16T08:15:59","date_gmt":"2018-09-16T08:15:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rusche.faculty.unlv.edu\/hel\/?page_id=160"},"modified":"2019-08-08T17:47:18","modified_gmt":"2019-08-08T17:47:18","slug":"phonological-change-vowels","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/rusche.faculty.unlv.edu\/hel\/home\/phonology\/phonological-change-vowels\/","title":{"rendered":"Phonological Change &#8211; Vowels"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Vowels are fundamentally different from consonants in several ways that affect how they can change. First, all vowels are voiced, so there cannot be a change in voicing. Second, all vowels are said in the same manner, so there cannot be changes in manner either. Finally, vowels are not produced by placing the tongue in contact with discrete speech organs, so there can be no movement from one part to another either. The features of vowels that can change are frontness, height, roundedness, and tenseness. The causes of this change can be neighboring consonants, although that is rare. More often, the change is a \u201clong-distance\u201d change in that it is produced by assimilating with vowels in a preceding or following syllable (since vowels form the nucleus of a syllable, other vowels are most often in other syllables). This type of change, where one vowel is influenced by another, is called <strong>metaphony<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p>One type of metaphony vowels undergo is <strong>mutation<\/strong>, where a vowel in one syllable anticipates a vowel in a following syllable and changes to become more like it. For example, in a two-syllable word with the pattern CV<sub>1<\/sub>CV<sub>2<\/sub>C, where C = Consonant and V = Vowel. In mutation V<sub>1<\/sub> changes to become more like V<sub>2<\/sub>, because it is easier for the tongue to anticipate the shape it will need to be in for the following vowel. In a word in which V<sub>1<\/sub> is a low vowel and V<sub>2<\/sub> is a high vowel, V<sub>1<\/sub> could be &#8220;raised&#8221; to a high vowel to anticipate the height of V<sub>2<\/sub> in the following syllable.<\/p>\n<p>Perhaps the most common example of mutation in English occurred just before the Old English period, when V<sub>2<\/sub> was an [i], a high front vowel. This caused the V<sub>1<\/sub> vowels to mutate towards the front of the mouth. We call this change either <strong>front mutation<\/strong>, or <strong>i-mutation<\/strong>, or in German, <strong>Umlaut<\/strong>, and it has had major effects throughout English. Compare the list of words with back vowels with related words with fronted vowels in the second:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>blood &#8211; bleed<\/li>\n<li>food &#8211; feed<\/li>\n<li>mouse &#8211; mice<\/li>\n<li>man &#8211; men<\/li>\n<li>drank &#8211; drench<\/li>\n<li>strong &#8211; strength<\/li>\n<li>full &#8211; fill<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>In all these examples the words on the left hand are the original words. In the period just before Old English, new words were made out of them by adding suffixes. The suffix in each case had the vowel [i], and this pulled the vowel in the original word to the front.<\/p>\n<div class=\"h5p-content\" data-content-id=\"2\"><\/div>\n<p><!--Vowels can also be raised or lowered (depending on tongue height). For example, think of how someone from the American South might say the word pen. For Standard American, the pronunciation is [p\u025bn] but in the South it is often [p\u026an], so that it sounds more like the word pin. The mid front lax vowel \/\u025b\/ has been raised to the high front lax vowel \/\u026a\/ because of the following nasal. --><\/p>\n<h3>Chain shifts<\/h3>\n<p>Vowels can also move in what are called chain shifts. This is not a form of assimilation or metaphony. Rather, it is a process of movement that starts with the raising or lowering of one vowel, which results in a chain of all other vowels moving to fill in the resulting gaps. The most famous one in English is the Great Vowel Shift of the 15th through the 18th centuries, which we will cover in detail later, but other chain shifts are currently going on in regional dialects of American English, such as the <a href=\"https:\/\/web.stanford.edu\/~eckert\/vowels.html\">Northern California vowel shift<\/a>. Another one, the <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Inland_Northern_American_English#Phonology_and_phonetics\">Northern Cities Vowel Shift,<\/a> explains why vowels of speakers from places like Chicago or Detroit sound so distinctive.<\/p>\n<h3>Reduction<\/h3>\n<p>Reduction is a change in the tenseness of vowel sounds, resulting in less tenseness. Vowels that are reduced change in a progression from tense to lax to schwa to zero or null, i.e., they are lost entirely. This is the standard progression in all English vowels in unaccented syllables, although not all vowels have or will undergo each stage of this progression, and it has had more of an impact on English grammar than anything else.<\/p>\n<p>An example of reduction is the vowel in the word \u201cman,\u201d [m\u00e6n], a low, front vowel. When the word stands alone and is stressed, the vowel remains in position. When the word is joined in a compound, as in \u201cchairman,\u201d it is no longer stressed and therefore is reduced. It may be pronounced as a schwa (i.e., moved from the front to the central, that is, neutral, position) [t\u0283\u025brm\u0259n], or even reduced to zero: [t\u0283\u025brmn\u0329].<\/p>\n<p>When reduction of a vowel is complete (i.e., the vowel is lost completely), then it is called elision: the loss of a sound because it is unstressed (elision can be used of both consonants and vowels). Elision is widespread in two of our major grammatical categories: the s-plural and the ed-past tense. The plural ending used to be a full syllable, as it remains in some words (\u201cdishes\u201d), but in most words the \u2013e- has reduced to zero, that is, it has been elided. The same reduction has happened in the past tense \u2013ed, which usually takes the form of either a [t] or a [d] on the ends of verbs.<\/p>\n<p><!--\nThere are specific words to describe different types of elision, depending on where in the word the sound has been lost:\n\napheresis: loss of an unstressed vowel at the front of words: \u2019bout (for about), \u2019round (for around)\nsyncope: loss of vowel sounds in the middle of a word: laboratory, comfortable [k\u0259\u0271ft\u0259rb\u0259l] (which includes metathesis of the [r] and [t]), family, contractions such as \u201ccan\u2019t\u201d or \u201cisn\u2019t\u201d for \u201ccannot\u201d and \u201cis not\u201d\napocope: loss of vowels from the end of a word (this has happened historically in many English words; we will see examples later).\nNote: these terms, apheresis, syncope and apocope, can actually be used whether you are talking about vowels or consonants. Thus, \u201cchile\u201d as a pronunciation of \u201cchild\u201d with simplification of the final consonant cluster is an example of apocope, or \u201cfith\u201d as a pronunciation of \u201cfifth\u201d is an example of syncope, as is \u201cwon\u2019t\u201d for \u201cwill not.\u201d The pronunciations \u2018im or \u2018e as a pronunciation of \u201chim\u201d or \u201che\u201d are examples of consonant apheresis. But the most common losses are with unstressed vowels.\n\nEpenthesis: Since we have talked about the loss of sounds, I will end with the addition of sounds that are not historically part of the word. Epenthesis can be the addition of vowels, such as when \u201cathlete\u201d is pronounced like \u201cathalete,\u201d or of consonant, such as in the following examples: \u201cdrownded\u201d for \u201cdrowned,\u201d \u201cfambly\u201d for \u201cfamily\u201d (compare also \u201cchimbly\u201d for chimney\u201d with dissimulation and epenthesis) \u201champton\u201d for what was originally \u201chamton,\u201d \u201cthunder\u201d for what used to be \u201cthunor,\u201d and \u201csherbert\u201d for \u201csherbet.\u201d\n--><\/p>\n<h3>Conditioned vs Unconditioned changes<\/h3>\n<p>Most of the sound changes discussed for consonants and vowels are conditioned changes, meaning they occur only when the sound occurs in a specific condition or environment. Thus, assimilation happens because of a certain condition of the word causing a specific consonant to changes its manner, place or voice. So, not every [n] will become [\u014b], but only the ones that occur before a velar sound, as in \u201cpancake\u201d and \u201cincredible.\u201d In fact, any change made by the principle of least effort is a conditioned change. The result is that different people in different regions make different choices about what sounds require least effort, and so different regions end up speaking differently depending on what changes are &#8220;acceptable&#8221; within their linguistic community. Only some dialects may undergo palatalization, where others may \u201cdecide\u201d that assimilation of place creates too much difficulty in comprehension and so avoid it.<\/p>\n<p><!-- Elision and epenthesis are also most often conditioned changes, occurring in specific words or inflectional morphemes based on the phonetic environment.\n--><\/p>\n<p>Other changes, however, like the change shifts in Northern California or the Northern Cities, or the cot-caught merger, are unconditioned. In unconditioned changes, all instances of a particular phoneme or allophone change, regardless of the phonetic condition it occurs in. Thus, for some speakers of American English, all instances of [\u0254] merged with [\u0251] so that there is now for them no distinction in pronunciation between the words \u201ccaught\u201d and \u201ccot\u201d and all other words with those same vowels \u2013 they are both pronounced with [\u0251]. This merger did not happen because of a preceding [t] or a following back vowel or anything else in the word, nor is it a change that happened to make the word easier to say, nor does it affect only the word \u201ccaught.\u201d There is no specific cause or condition that can be identified for why the merger took place.<\/p>\n<p>As with conditioned changes, unconditioned changes happen differently in different dialects. The Northern Cities shift is occurring in only certain cities in the northeast and northern midwest of the U.S. The caught-cot merger only happened in parts of the U.S. Eventually, so many little changes, conditioned and unconditioned, happen in different dialects that it becomes impossible to understand what a person speaking that dialect is saying. Their phonemes have shifted to a different set than the one used by other speakers. That is one way language changes over time and diverges into multiple languages.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Vowels are fundamentally different from consonants in several ways that affect how they can change. First, all vowels are voiced, so there cannot be a change in voicing. Second, all vowels are said in the same manner, so there cannot be changes in manner either. Finally, vowels are not produced by placing the tongue in [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":74,"menu_order":8,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-160","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rusche.faculty.unlv.edu\/hel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/160","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rusche.faculty.unlv.edu\/hel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rusche.faculty.unlv.edu\/hel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rusche.faculty.unlv.edu\/hel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rusche.faculty.unlv.edu\/hel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=160"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/rusche.faculty.unlv.edu\/hel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/160\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":207,"href":"https:\/\/rusche.faculty.unlv.edu\/hel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/160\/revisions\/207"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rusche.faculty.unlv.edu\/hel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/74"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rusche.faculty.unlv.edu\/hel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=160"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}