7
votes
What are the most common sound changes in natlangs?
By far the most common changes are assimilation, one sound becoming more similar to a nearby sound, and lenition, a sound shifting to require less articulatory effort. These are both broad categories ...
- 4,016
5
votes
Accepted
How to prevent all of my words being eroded away to nothing
As a general rule, regular sound changes wear away at words, reducing their information content.
Countering this, morphosyntactic changes restore the lost information.
For example, let's look at Latin....
- 4,016
3
votes
Accepted
How much of the irregularity caused by sound change (e.g. vowel loss) will be retained in inflectional paradigms?
The way I put it in historical linguistics classes is:
Sound laws are entirely regular, and create irregularity
Analogy is entirely irregular, and creates regularity
In other words, neogrammarian-...
- 4,016
3
votes
How to prevent all of my words being eroded away to nothing
Sound shifts are to some amount irreversible. Long before your words are completely gone, the rate of homophones rises and the speakers of the language have to deal with it in some way or another.
The ...
- 11k
3
votes
What are the most common sound changes in natlangs?
Here are a couple sound changes I use when I'm not sure what to do:
Voiceless consonants becoming voiced between two vowels (intervocalic voicing)
[u] and [o] becoming [y] and [ø] in the environment ...
- 413
3
votes
What are the most common sound changes in natlangs?
Things are probably hard to quantify, but some specific sound changes seem to be more frequent than others, most notably:
/h/ -> /∅/ (loss of /h/)
The consonant system often has gaps at /p/ and /g/:...
- 11k
2
votes
How much of the irregularity caused by sound change (e.g. vowel loss) will be retained in inflectional paradigms?
Define "huge amount". Let's say this is for verb conjugation (maybe it's avtually for nouns; you didn't specify). If there's some commonality - e.g. vowel syncope as you mention - among ...
- 474
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