LIN200H1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: North American English, Language Change, Neologism
Document Summary
Languages are prone to many diferent kinds of changes over time. A greater-than sign (>) is used to indicate any kind of historical language change, with the older form on the let. A language change that afects the sounds of a language is known as a sound change. A signiicant shit in historical linguistics occurred with the introduction of the regularity principle (a. k. a. the. Neogrammarian hypothesis), which was the idea that all sound changes are regular (i. e. that they apply uniformly in a consistent phonetic environment). In general, the regularity principle seems to be mostly correct, but we still have to account for various kinds of sporadic change (change that is not regular), including most changes not having to do with sounds. Once two sounds have merged, there is no longer any way to reliably distinguish them directly in the language. However, other sound changes can interact to increase the number of phonemes, causing a split.
