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There are many different routes to language change. Changes can take
originate in language learning, or through language contact, social
differentiation, and natural processes in usage .
Natural processes in usage . Rapid or casual speech naturally produces
processes such as assimilation ,
dissimilation , syncope and apocope . Through repetition, particular cases
may become conventionalized, and therefore produced even in slower or
more careful speech. Word meaning change in a similar way, through
conventionalization of processes like metaphor and metonymy
Some linguists distinguish between internal and external sources of
language change, with "internal" sources of change being those that occur
within a single languistic community, and contact phenomena being the
main examples of an external source of change.
The analogy with evolution via natural
selection
1. Sound change
In the cases where we have access to several historical stages -- for instance,
the development of the modern Romance Languages from Latin -- these
sound changes are remarkably regular. Techniques developed in such cases
permit us to reconstruct the sound system -- and some of the vocabulary -- of
unattested parent languages from information about daughter languages.
In some cases, an old sound becomes a new sound across the board. Such a
change occurred in Hawai'ian, in that all the " t" sounds in an older form of the
language became " k"s: at the time Europeans encountered Hawai'ian, there
were no " t"s in it at all, though the closely related languages Tahitian, Samoan,
Tongan and Maori all have " t"s.
Types of Change
2. Processes of sound change.
Another dimension along which we can look at sound change is by
classifying changes according to the particular process involved.
Assimilation, or the influence of one sound on an adjacent sound, is
perhaps the most pervasive process. Assimilation processes changed Latin
/k/ when followed by /i/ or /y/, first to /ky/, then to "ch", then to /s/, so that
Latin faciat /fakiat/ 'would make' became fasse /fas/ in Modern French
(the subjunctive of the verb faire 'to make').Palatalization is a kind of
assimilation.
In contrast to assimilation, dissimilation, metathesis, and haplology tend to
occur more sporadically, i.e., to affect individual words. Dissimilation
involves a change in one of two 'same' sounds that are adjacent or almost
adjacent in a particular word such that they are no longer the same.
How do we know how languages are
related?
Linguists rely on systematic sound changes to establish the relationships between
languages. The basic idea is that when a change occurs within a speech
community, it gets diffused across the entire community of speakers of the
language.
Languages that share innovations are considered to have shared a common
history apart from other languages, and are put on the same branch of the
language family tree.
Sound changes work to change the actual phonetic form of the word in the
different languages, but we can still recognize them as originating from a common
source because of the regularities within each language. For example, a change
happened in Italian such that in initial consonant clusters, the l that originally
followed p and f changed to i. Thus Italian words like fiore 'flower'; fiume 'river';
pioggia 'rain'; and piuma 'feather' are cognates with the French fleur; fleuve; pluie;
and plume, respectively, and with Spanish flora, fluvial (adj. 'riverine'); lluvia (by a
later change); and pluma respectively.
What are the results of language change?