Bibliography
- Blevins, Juliette. 2004. Evolutionary phonology: The emergence of sound patterns. Cambridge University Press.
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Evolutionary Phonology is an approach to phonology and historical linguistics, based on the idea that recurrent synchronic sound patterns, if not inherited from the mother tongue, are the result of recurrent sound changes, while rare patterns are the product of rare changes or a combination of independent changes. [1]
Phonology is a branch of linguistics concerned with the systematic organization of sounds in spoken languages and signs in sign languages. It used to be only the study of the systems of phonemes in spoken languages, but it may also cover any linguistic analysis either at a level beneath the word or at all levels of language where sound or signs are structured to convey linguistic meaning.
Historical linguistics, also called diachronic linguistics, is the scientific study of language change over time. Principal concerns of historical linguistics include:
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Approximants are speech sounds that involve the articulators approaching each other but not narrowly enough nor with enough articulatory precision to create turbulent airflow. Therefore, approximants fall between fricatives, which do produce a turbulent airstream, and vowels, which produce no turbulence. This class of sounds includes lateral approximants like, non-lateral approximants like, and semivowels like and.
A phoneme is one of the units of sound that distinguish one word from another in a particular language.
The Sound Pattern of English is a 1968 work on phonology by Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle. It presents a view of the phonology of English, and has been very influential in both the field of phonology and in the analysis of the English language. Chomsky and Halle present a view of phonology as a linguistic subsystem, separate from other components of the grammar, that transforms an underlying phonemic sequence according to rules and produces as its output the phonetic form that is uttered by a speaker. The theory fits with the rest of Chomsky's early theories of language in the sense that it is transformational; as such it serves as a landmark in Chomsky's theories by adding a clearly articulated theory of phonology to his previous work which focused on syntax.
An affricate is a consonant that begins as a stop and releases as a fricative, generally with the same place of articulation. It is often difficult to decide if a stop and fricative form a single phoneme or a consonant pair. English has two affricate phonemes, and, often spelled ch and j, respectively.
A vowel shift is a systematic sound change in the pronunciation of the vowel sounds of a language.
In phonology, assimilation is a sound change where some phonemes change to be more similar to other nearby sounds. It is a common type of phonological process across languages. Assimilation can occur either within a word or between words. It occurs in normal speech, and it becomes more common in more rapid speech. In some cases, assimilation causes sound spoken to differ from the normal "correct" pronunciation of each sound in isolation. In other cases, the changed sound is considered canonical for that word or phrase.
A nasal vowel is a vowel that is produced with a lowering of the soft palate so that the air flow escapes through the nose and the mouth simultaneously, as in the French vowel
In phonetics, nasalization is the production of a sound while the velum is lowered, so that some air escapes through the nose during the production of the sound by the mouth. An archetypal nasal sound is.
Implosive consonants are a group of stop consonants with a mixed glottalic ingressive and pulmonic egressive airstream mechanism. That is, the airstream is controlled by moving the glottis downward in addition to expelling air from the lungs. Therefore, unlike the purely glottalic ejective consonants, implosives can be modified by phonation. Contrastive implosives are found in approximately 13% of the world's languages.
In linguistics, fortis and lenis, sometimes identified with tense and lax, are pronunciations of consonants with relatively greater and lesser energy. English has fortis consonants, such as the p in pat, with a corresponding lenis consonant, such as the b in bat. Fortis and lenis consonants may be distinguished by tenseness or other characteristics, such as voicing, aspiration, glottalization, velarization, length, and length of nearby vowels. Fortis and lenis were coined for languages where the contrast between sounds such as p and b does not involve voicing.
The voiceless palato-alveolar sibilant affricate or voiceless domed postalveolar sibilant affricate is a type of consonantal sound used in some spoken languages. The sound is transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet with ⟨t͡ʃ⟩, ⟨t͜ʃ⟩ or ⟨tʃ⟩. It is familiar to English speakers as the "ch" sound in "chip".
In linguistics, apophony is any sound change within a word that indicates grammatical information.
Nhanda, also rendered Nhanta and Nhandi is an Australian Aboriginal language from the Midwest region of Western Australia, between Geraldton and the Murchison River, from the coast to about 20 kilometres (12 mi) inland. The language is now spoken, or semi-spoken, by only a few people.
John J. Ohala is a Professor Emeritus in linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. He specializes in phonetics and phonology.
In phonology, voicing is a sound change where a voiceless consonant becomes voiced due to the influence of its phonological environment; shift in the opposite direction is referred to as devoicing or desonorization. Most commonly, the change is a result of sound assimilation with an adjacent sound of opposite voicing, but it can also occur word-finally or in contact with a specific vowel.
Palantla Chinantec, also known as Chinanteco de San Pedro Tlatepuzco, is a major Chinantecan language of Mexico, spoken in San Juan Palantla and a couple dozen neighboring towns in northern Oaxaca. The variety of San Mateo Yetla, known as Valle Nacional Chinantec, has marginal mutual intelligibility.
Panchronic phonology is an approach to historical phonology. Its aim is to formulate generalizations about sound changes that are independent of any particular language or language group.
Recurrent evolution is the repeated evolution of a particular character. Most evolution, or changes in allele frequencies from one generation to the next, is the result of drift, or random chance of some alleles getting passed down and others not. Recurrent evolution is when patterns emerge from this stochastic process when looking across populations. These patterns are of particular interest to evolutionary biologists as they can teach people about the underlying forces of evolution.
Juliette Blevins is an American linguist whose work has contributed to the fields of phonology, phonetics, historical linguistics, and typology. She is currently Professor of Linguistics at the Graduate Center, CUNY, where she has been employed since 2010. She is the founder of the approach of Evolutionary phonology. She is also the director of the Endangered Language Initiative, co-director of the Endangered Language Alliance, and a co-founder of the Yurok Language Project.