Tag: phonology

Human speech is a fascinating thing. We know that babies can learn to speak any natural language—those languages wouldn’t exist otherwise—and most conlangs are also designed to be learned and spoken. In short, any human can pronounce any human sound. There’s nothing really stopping us except our own received cultural strictures.

Now, if you’re in the business of making languages that sound “weird”, you can use this simple fact to your advantage. Many natural languages have strange sounds in their phonemic inventories. Some are shared with their close relatives, a few are more widespread, and then you have those that occasionally develop in isolation. Whatever the case, adding in some of these sounds is a surefire way to create something very different.

So this post is a brief survey of some of the odder parts of the IPA, all of which appear in one or more spoken human languages presently in existence. None of these, therefore, is truly “alien”. Indeed, we’ll start with a pair you already know.

Dental fricatives

The dental fricatives come in a matched pair, voiced /ð/ and voiceless /θ/. Both are fairly rare, as phonemes go, yet pretty much everyone in the world has heard them spoken, because they’re both present in English. To make matters worse, they’re both written the same way in our language: th. Yep, we English speakers are in the minority here, as far as language numbers go.

As far as population goes, on the other hand, it’s a different story. English has them, and so do standard Arabic, Castilian Spanish, Greek, and a few other big names. On the other hand, we’re far outnumbered by those who lack the th sounds, including such notables as German and French. (That’s the source for their stereotypical accents.) Most other languages with dental fricatives are relatively small, and quite spread out.

Clicks

When people think of “weird” sounds, the clicks are usually near the top of the list. These are only common as phonemes in sub-Saharan Africa, and even there they are absent from most language families. They’re omnipresent in Khoisan, and most of the other languages where they appear seem to have borrowed them from there.

Even if you’ve never heard someone speaking Zulu or Xhosa, however, you’ve probably heard (and even used) clicks before. The chiding or disapproving “tsk” sound is, in fact, the dental click /ǀ/. The sound you make to get a horse moving (I assume, as I’ve never had to do that) is a lateral click /ǁ/. The trick, then, is learning to pronounce those in sequence with more “normal” phonemes. That’s a lot harder, and it’s one reason why nobody outside of Africa bothers to learn such languages.

Most languages with clicks will have a set of them, and there are far more than those two above. Search around for audio clips of people pronouncing them, and see how familiar they are if you forget they’re part of a “weird” language.

Double articulations

It’s possible to pronounce a sound that has two articulations, meaning that there are two places in the mouth where there is contact. Mostly, this is a combination of labial and velar, coming in voiceless /kp/, voiced /gb/, and nasal /ŋm/ varieties. These tend to show up in Africa (such as Igbo, whose name contains one), but they also appear in some languages of New Guinea. I’ll freely admit I don’t have the slightest idea how to pronounce them.

Implosives and ejectives

These two sets of sounds are kind of like mirrored reflections of each other. Ejectives are always voiceless, implosives always voiced, and you can have either of them at just about any point of articulation. About the only difference is that you can have ejective fricatives and affricates. What they are is hard to describe, if I’m honest, so I’ll leave that to the experts.

Both are somewhat rare as phonemes. Ejectives pop up mostly in indigenous languages of the Americas, as well as East Africa, though the Caucasus (e.g., Georgian) is full of them. Implosives tend to be found in sub-Saharan Africa, with scattered occurrences elsewhere. Either one, assuming you can pronounce it, could be a good option for oddity.

Creaky and breathy voice

These aren’t so much phonemes as they are “phonations”: different ways of pronouncing a sound. Again, I’ll refer you elsewhere for the specifics; we’re only interested here with their use in languages.

Mostly, creaky voice is closer to an intonation feature than a phonemic one, but a few languages use it as a distinction. Breathy voice (also called “murmured voice”), however, is much more common. It’s the “voiced aspirate” set in Hindi and similar languages. Either one can work for vowels or consonants, and they’re another one of those “if you can figure it out, it might be useful” things.

Everything else

We haven’t even scratched the surface of strangeness in the realm of the phonetic, but this should be a good starting point for your own exploration. Too few conlangs, in my opinion, use these and other “weird” sounds to great effect. Either they ignore them entirely (fair enough, as they’re rare for a reason) or they overdo them. Used judiciously, however, they can impart an alien flavor into an otherwise “bland” language.

Not every sound change works on just consonants or just vowels. Some can transmute one into the other. Others affect entire syllables or words. A few work on a different level entirely. So, we’ll finish this series by looking at these “miscellaneous” types of evolution.

Tones

Tones have to come from somewhere. One of the ways they can appear (tonogenesis) is through the loss of consonants preceding or following a vowel. A voiced consonant, for instance, can cause the vowel after it to be spoken at a lower pitch. If those consonant go away, the change in pitch can remain: a low tone. As another example, a number of consonant elisions led to the tonal system of Chinese, along with its restrictive syllable structure.

Once a language has tone, it becomes a target for evolution. Tones can change, merge, split, and disappear, exactly as phonemes. Unstressed syllables may develop a neutral tone, which might get reanalyzed as one of the existing tones. Sequences of tones can affect each other, as well, a complex process called tone sandhi.

Like any other part of language, tone is subject to the same forces that drive all sound change, which can be summed up as human laziness. More on that later.

Sandhi

The term sandhi comes from Sanskrit; roughly speaking, it means “joining”. In modern linguistics, it’s a catch-all term used for any kind of sound change that crosses the boundary between morphemes. The “linking” R in some English dialects is a kind of sandhi, and so is the use of the article “an” before vowels. Romance languages show a couple more instances of the process: Spanish de el → del; Italian della → dell’; the heavy use of liaison in French.

When sandhi becomes systematic, it can create new words, like Spanish del and al. These, of course, can then be changed by any other sound change. And it’s not limited to vowels. Consonants can also be affected by sandhi. The most common expression of this is anticipatory voicing across word boundaries, but other types of assimilation are equally valid.

Epenthesis

Epenthesis is the adding of a sound, the opposite of elision. It’s another way of breaking up a cluster that violates a language’s phonological rules or aesthetic sensibilities. Some epenthesis is a kind of sandhi, like English “an”, and the diaresis discussed last week is another form. Those aren’t the only possibilities, though.

An epenthetic vowel can be inserted between two consonants, and this will usually be a neutral vowel, whatever the language considers that to be. Schwa (/ə/) is a common choice, but /e/, /a/, and /o/ also pop up. /i/ and /u/, however, are usually too strong.

Similarly, strings of vowels may be broken up by epenthetic consonants. Again, something weak and unassuming is needed, something like /r/, /n/, /l/, /h/, or /ʔ/. /w/ and /j/ can be used as glides, as we have seen, but they’ll tend to be used only when they can relate to one of the vowels.

Another option for consonant clusters is an epenthetic consonant, one that bridges the gap between the two. Greek, for example, shows a sound change /mr/ → /mbr/, as seen in words like “ambrosia”. Many speakers of English insert epenthetic consonants like this all over, without even knowing it, like the [p] in “something”. (If this became phonemic, it would be essentially the same thing that happened to Greek.)

Haplology

Two syllables that are fairly close in sound may not stay together for very long. Haplology is a sound change that involves the deletion of one syllable of such a pair. It can be either one, and there’s no standard for how “close” two syllables need to be to trigger the change. English examples include the common pronunciations of “probably” and “February”, and others aren’t hard to find. (In another one of those linguistic oddities, “haplology” itself can fall victim to this, becoming “haplogy”.)

Applying the rules

Although there are plenty of other sound changes out there—again, I refer you to Index Diachronica for more—we have gathered enough over the last three posts to start looking at how to apply them to a conlang. There are plenty of programs out there that can do this for you, but it helps to know the rules. These aren’t set in stone, mind you, but you should have a good reason for breaking them. (That reason would probably lead to more conlanging, so I’m not complaining.)

First, evolutionary sound changes are regular. They’ll almost always happen when the right conditions are met. If you’ve got devoicing of final stops, as in German, then essentially every final stop is going to get devoiced. Sure, there may be exceptions, but those exceptions can be explained. Maybe those words appeared in their current forms after the sound change.

Second, remember that sound changes don’t care. This is a subset of regularity, but it bears repeating. A sound change will affect a word no matter what that word’s history. A particular evolutionary condition may be met because of an earlier sound change, but later changes won’t know that. They’ll only “see” a word ripe for alteration.

Third, sound changes operate on a lower level. They’re “below” grammar and, as such, aren’t affected by it. But this means that grammatical ambiguity can arise, as when sounds of case endings are merged or dropped. (This one happened in both English and the Romance languages.) Speakers will then need to find ways of clearing things up, leading to innovations on the grammar side of things.

Fourth, sound change stems from laziness, a desire to minimize the effort required in speaking and conveying our thoughts. Weak sounds disappear, dissimilar sounds merge, and it’s all because we, as a whole, know we can get away with it. As long as there’s enough left to get the message across, all else is simply extraneous baggage. And that’s what’s most likely to change.

Finally, evolution is unceasing. When it comes to language, the only constant is change. Even our best efforts at writing and education and language academies can’t stop sound change. There will always be differences in speech. Those will form dialects, and then those may split into new, mutually unintelligible languages.

In this part of our little series, we’ll look at some of the sound changes that can affect vowels. Since there tend to be far fewer vowels than consonants in a language’s phonemic inventory, there aren’t as many places for these sound changes to go. For the same reason, however, the vowel system of a language is more prone to change, with new phonemes coming into use and old ones disappearing.

Vowels

Before we begin, think of (or look at) the IPA vowel chart. It’s usually depicted as something like a trapezoid, but it’s just as easy to imagine it as a triangle with vertices at /i/, /a/, and /u/. All the other vowel sounds—/e/, /y/, /ø/, and so on—are along the sides or in the middle. This conception will make a few of the sound changes described below seem more obvious.

Umlaut

The process of umlaut, as found in German, is an example of a larger phenomenon used referred to as fronting. Either term is fine for amateur conlangers, because everyone will know what you mean. Whatever you call it, it’s a change that causes vowels to move towards the front of the mouth.

Most commonly, fronting occurs under the influence of an /i/ sound. (In that, it’s almost like a kind of vowel harmony, or the vowel version of assimilation.) Sometimes, the /i/ later disappears, leaving behind the affected vowel as its only trace.

The Germanic languages embraced fronting to varying degrees, and they’re the best example around. German itself, of course, has the front rounded vowels ü and ö; the diacritic is often called an umlaut for just this reason. Old English, meanwhile, back /ɑ/ was fronted to /æ/. Swedish brought its /uː/ frontward to become /ʉː/. And the list goes on.

Fronting doesn’t always happen, so the back vowels aren’t totally lost. Instead, it can become a way to add in more front vowels; overall, languages tend to have more in the front than the back. Or it can cause mergers, as [y] becomes reinterpreted as /i/. This very thing happened in Greek, for instance.

Raising and lowering

Instead of bringing a vowel to the front, raising brings it up. Usually, this moves a sound one “step” up on the vowel chart: /a/ → /e/ → /i/. Intermediate steps like /ɛ/ can come into play, as well. An example of this process happening right now is in my own dialect of US Southern English, where some vowels are raised before nasal sounds. Thus, “pin” and “pen” sound alike.

The environment usually causes raising, but it’s not any specific sound that triggers it. Nasals can, as they do for me, but raised vowels later in the word can do it, too. So can other consonants. In general, it works out to yet another form of assimilation—vowels will tend to be raised by proximity to other “high” sounds. The reason it works so well for nasals is because they’re the highest in the mouth that you can get: in the nose.

Unlike fronting, raising seems to be more “effective”. But this makes it possible for other sound changes to come into play, sweeping into the vocalic void left behind. If raising gets rid of most instances of /a/, for example, some other sound will likely change to fill that gap.

The opposite of raising, lowering, is one such way of accomplishing this. It’s the same thing as raising, but in reverse: /u/ → /o/ → /a/ is a common trend. Front vowels appear to be harder to lower, likely from the massive influence of /i/, but it’s possible to do, say, /e/ → /ɛ/.

Nasalization

Vowels near nasal sounds might assimilate to them, in a change called nasalization. If the change is thorough enough, it can even result in the loss of the nasal consonant, leaving only a nasal vowel. That was the case in French and Portuguese, both of which have a set of nasalized vowels.

Any of the nasal sounds work for this, from /m/ to /ɴ/, but the “big three” of /n/, /m/, and /ŋ/ are the most common in languages, in that order. They’ll be the likely suspects. If nasalization occurs, then it will probably be on those vowels that precede these sounds; vowels following nasals are less susceptible to the change. Nasals at the end of a word or right before another consonant are the best candidates for the total nasalization that results in their disappearance.

A similar change can occur with /r/-like (rhotic) sounds, but this is much less common. It is a way to get a series of rhotic vowels like those in American English, and it’s conceivable that the difference between “regular” and “rhoticized” could become phonemic.

Lengthening and shortening

Solitary vowel phonemes can, in some cases, become long vowels or diphthongs. On the other hand, it’s easy for those to revert to short vowels. (And those can be shortened further, dropping out altogether, but we’ll get to that in a moment.)

These changes are very connected to the stress pattern of a word. Stressed vowels are more likely to be lengthened or broken into diphthongs. Unstressed vowels, by contrast, get the opposite treatment: reduction and shortening. That’s not the only reason these processes can happen, but it is the primary one.

The total elision of unstressed vowels is also quite possible. This can happen between consonants (syncope), at the beginning of a word (apheresis) or at its end (apocope). All of these are historically attested, both in natural language evolution and in borrowed words. Syncope, for example, occurs in British English pronunciations of words like secretary, while apocope turns American “going” to “goin'”.

Combining and breaking

Two vowels that end up beside each other (probably because of consonant changes) can create an unstable situation. Like the case of consonant clusters, vowel clusters “want” to simplify. They can go about this in a couple of different ways.

The easiest way is for the two to combine into a diphthong or long vowel. Where this isn’t possible, one of the vowels may assimilate to the other, much like consonants. Alternatively, the two might “average out”, fusing into a sort of compromise sound, like /au/ → /o/ (or /oː/, if that’s possible in the language).

Another potential outcome is a separation into two syllables by adding a glide. For example, one form of this diaresis is /ie/ → /i.je/. Once the vowel cluster is broken apart, other sound changes can then alter the new structure, potentially even re-merging the cluster.

Onward

Plenty of other vowel changes exist, but these are the most common and most defining. Next time, we’ll wrap up the series with a look at some of the sound changes that sit outside of the usual consonant/vowel dichotomy, as well as those that can affect a whole word. Also, we’ll conclude with a few rules of thumb to help you get the most out of your conlang’s evolution.

Languages change all the time. Words, of course, are the most obvious illustration of this, especially when we look at slang and such. Grammar, by contrast, tends to be a bit more static, but not wholly so; English used to have noun case, but it no longer does.

The sounds of a language fall into a middle ground. New words are invented all the time, while old ones fall out of fashion, but the phonemes that make up those words take a longer time to change. This does, however, occur more often than wholesale grammatical alterations. (In fact, sound change can lead to changes in grammar, but it’s hard to see how the opposite can happen.)

This brief miniseries will detail some of the main ways sounds can change in a language. The idea is to give you, the conlanger, a new tool for making naturalistic languages. I won’t be covering everything here—I don’t have time for that, nor do you. Examples will be necessarily brief. The Index Diachronica is a massive catalog of sound changes that have occurred in real-world languages, and it’s a good resource for conlangers looking for this sort of thing.

Consonants

We’ll start by looking at some of the main sound changes that can happen to consonants. Yes, some effects are equally valid for consonants and vowels, but I had to divide this up somehow.

Lenition

Lenition is one of the most common sound changes. Basically, it’s a kind of “weakening” of a consonant into another. Stops can weaken into affricates or fricatives, for instance; German did this after English and its relatives broke away, hence “white” versus weiß. Another word is “father”, which shows two examples of this—compare it to Latin pater, which isn’t too far off from the ancestral form. (Interestingly, you can even say that “lenition” itself is a victim.)

Fricatives can weaken further into approximants (or even flaps or taps): one such change, of /s/ to /h/, happened early on in Greek, hence “heptagon”, using the Greek-derived root “hepta-“. Latin didn’t take this particular route, giving us “September” from Latin septem “seven”.

Approximants don’t really have anywhere to go. They’re already weak enough as it is. The only place for them to go is away, and that sometimes happens, a process called elision. Other sounds can be elided, but the approximants are the most prone to it. In English, for instance, we’ve lost /h/ (and older /x/) in a lot of places. (“im” for “him” is just the same process continuing in the present day.)

Lenition and elision tend to happen in two main places: between vowels and at the end of a word. Those aren’t the only places, however.

Assimilation

Assimilation is when a sound becomes more like another. This can happen with any pair of phonemes, but consonants are more susceptible, if only because they’re more likely to be adjacent.

Most assimilation involves voicing or the point of articulation. In other words, an unvoiced sound next to a voiced one is an unstable situation, as is a cluster like /kf/. Humans are lazy, it seems, and they want to talk with the least effort possible. Thus, disparate sequences of sounds like /bs/ or /mg/ tend to become more homogenized. (Good examples in English are all those Latin borrowings where ad- shows up as “al-” or “as-“, like “assimilation”.)

Obviously, there are a few ways this can play out. Either sound can be the one to change—/bs/ can end up as /ps/ or /bz/—but it tends to be the leading phoneme that gets altered. How it changes is another factor, and this depends on the language. If the two sounds are different in voicing, then that’ll likely shift first. If they’re at different parts of the vocal tract, then the one that changes will slide towards the other. Thus, /bs/ will probably come out as /ps/, while /mg/ ends up as /ŋg/.

Assimilation is also one way to get rid of consonant clusters. Some of the consonants will assimilate, then they’ll disappear. Or maybe they won’t, and they’ll create geminates, as in Italian

Metathesis

Anyone who’s ever heard the word “ask” pronounced as “ax” can identify metathesis, the rearranging of sounds. This can happen just about anywhere, but it often seems to occur with sound sequences that are relatively uncommon in a language, like the /sk/ cluster in English.

This one isn’t quite as systematic in English, but other languages do have regular metathesis sound changes. Spanish often swapped /l/ and /r/, for example, sometimes in different syllables. One common thread that crosses linguistic barriers involves the sonority hierarchy. A cluster like /dn/ is more likely to turn into /nd/ than the other way around.

Palatalization, etc.

Any of the “secondary” characteristics of a consonant can be changed. Consonants can be palatalized, labialized, velarized, glottalized, and so on. This usually happens because they’re next to a sound that displays one of those properties. It’s like assimilation, in a way.

Palatalization appears to be the most common of these, often affecting consonants adjacent to a front vowel. (/i/ is the likely culprit, but /e/ and /y/ work, too.) Labialization sometimes happens around back rounded vowels like /u/. Glottal stops, naturally, tend to cause glottalization, etc. Often, the affecting sound will disappear after it does its work.

Dissimliation

Dissimliation is the opposite of assimilation: it makes sounds more different. This can occur in response to a kind of phonological confusion, but it doesn’t seem to be very common as a regular process. Words like “colonel” (pronounced as “kernel”) show dissimilation in English, and examples can be found in many other languages.

Even more…

There are a lot of possible sound changes we haven’t covered, and that’s just in the consonants! Most of the other ways consonants can evolve are much rarer, however. Fortition, for example, is the opposite of lenition, but instances of it are vastly outnumbered by those of the latter.

Vowels present yet more opportunities to change up the sound of a language, and we’ll see them next week. Then, we’ll wrap up the series by looking at all the other ways the sound of a word can change over time.