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Copyright of Larq Journal for Philosophy, Linguistics & Social Sciences is the property of Republic of Iraq Ministry of Higher Education & Scientific Research (MOHESR) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article reviews the status of the trap-bath split in the counties of Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire, and Derbyshire in the East Midlands of England. The East Midlands forms a linguistic transition zone between northern English varieties which lack (part of) the trap-bath split, and southern English varieties which have this split. We examine the acoustic properties of trap and bath in the region to determine whether this pattern is stable over time or diffusing. Reading-passage data, stratified by age group, sex, and location are used to provide an apparent time and multilocal view on the distribution of the two vowel categories. Results suggest there is no complete overlap between these vowel sets in the region, although it varies across the East Midlands. Furthermore, we find the East Midlands apparently occupies a stable middle ground between northern and south-eastern varieties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using an auditory identification task, this study examined the perceptual cue-weighting patterns of 29 younger Korean listeners as they distinguished between aspirated and lenis stops across various prosodic positions. The focus was on whether their perceptual routines reflected the ongoing sound change, namely the cross-generational shift from VOT to F0 in feature primacy. Consistent with the known prosodic constraint of this sound change, listeners relied more heavily on F0 cues in phrase-initial positions, while VOT retained feature primacy in phrase-medial contexts. Importantly, listeners adjusted their cue-weighting strategies depending on the talker’s age. When listening to younger talkers, as compared to older talkers, listeners were more responsive to F0 cues and reduced their reliance on VOT cues. These age-related effects occurred only for phrase-initial stops. Our findings suggest that Korean stop categorization is flexibly informed by both talker characteristics and speech prosody based on listeners’ prior experiences, which would facilitate cross-talker adaptation, and that the age-indexed perceptual flexibility is categorically governed by the higher-order intonational structure of Seoul Korean. Overall, the results contribute to the understanding of how social and linguistic factors interact in shaping mental representations of a sociophonetic variable under sound change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Indogermanische Forschungen: Zeitschrift für Indogermanistik und allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft is the property of De Gruyter and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The present article reports the results of an acoustic analysis of Czech, Slovak and Croatian words containing a syllabic rhotic, with a view to determining whether rhotics of this type should be regarded as syllabic consonants or rather as vowel-rhotic sequences, due to being preceded by an intrusive vocalic element. The primary objective of the study was to describe the temporal and spectral properties of intrusive vocalic elements that precede and sometimes follow the rhotic segment in order to define the extent to which they vary in the three languages. To achieve the aim, an acoustic analysis of samples of read speech was performed. The recordings were obtained from native speakers of Croatian, Czech and Slovak who read a list of words embedded in a carrier phrase. The analysis of the temporal data was meant to reveal whether the syllabic rhotics of the three languages are developing towards becoming vowel-rhotic sequences, which has recently occurred in Slovene. Syllabic rhotics, usually realised as taps, are normally flanked by vocalic segments that not only have a distinct formant structure, but also appear to be sufficiently long to determine their quality. The analysis points to the conclusion that intrusive vocalic elements are schwa-like segments in the sense that the values of their formants (F1 and F2) tend to be similar to those of the schwa vowel. Also, the findings reveal that the average duration of the intrusive segments is considerably longer in Croatian than in Czech and Slovak. Thus, the results indicate that a sound change might be taking place in Croatian. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Diachronica is the property of John Benjamins Publishing Co. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Some late Renaissance scholars, like Smith (1568); Hart (1569; 1570); Bullokar (1580); Mulcaster (1582), attempted to reform English spelling to reflect the pronunciation changes resulting from the Great Vowel Shift. Their goal was to align letters and phonology by devising a more stable and predictable new system. This study explores the impact and diffusion of these spelling proposals. It examines texts from 1300 to 1700, written by authors from different socio-demographic and biological backgrounds, and across various genres, registers and text-types. The sources used as linguistic materials are the Innsbruck Corpus of Middle English Prose, an archival data source of prose pieces representing different genres from 1150 to 1500 and the Parsed Corpus of Early English Correspondence, a collection of 4,970 authored documents written from 1410 to 1681 by informants from different social ranks. This study may allow us to trace the sociolinguistic and stylistic route and rate of adoption (if any) followed by these attempts at reforming the English spelling system within processes of diffusion of linguistic innovations at the level of orthography, as well as to reconstruct the sociolinguistic contexts of language variation and change in past communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Diachronica is the property of John Benjamins Publishing Co. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The original form of a language is often changed when the language is borrowed into the target language. In Malay, one of the changes that can be observed is the reduction of syllable segments. The change results from integrating and adapting the source language to the target language for native-like adaptation. Therefore, this study investigates the reduction of syllable segments and phonological changes of syllable segments in Arabic loan verbs. The reduction of syllable segments refers to a segmental reduction in the first, second or third syllable. The phonological change of the syllable segment refers to the sound change that occurs when the syllable segment is reduced. This study uses Arabic loan verbs in Kamus Dewan Perdana as research data. The collected data was transcribed and 30 Arabic loanwords were found to have syllable segment reduction. The data is then analysed using the theory of sound change to determine the phonological changes that occur in the syllable segments in the Arabic loanwords. The study results show that there are 3 types of segmental reduction located in the first syllable, 26 verbs in the second syllable and 3 verbs in the third syllable. In addition, the study's results also show that phonological changes for syllable segments in Arabic loanwords occur through vowel adaptation, neutralization and scramble. These changes generally take the form of vowel adjustments that shorten the vowel sound of the original Arabic spelling, which accounts for most of the sound changes in syllable segment reduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the shift asymmetries of the High German Consonant Shift. In one part of this sound change, Pre-Old High German ⁺/p/, ⁺/t/, and ⁺/k/ shifted to the Old High German affricates [pf], [ts], and [kx], respectively. However, the voiceless stops did not shift in every dialect of Old High German. The uneven distribution of the shift is referred to in the literature as shift asymmetry. Much work by Iverson, Davis, and Salmons has attributed the asymmetry to markedness. While maintaining their overall analysis of the shift, this article shows that markedness can be dispensed with in accounting for the shift asymmetries. In accordance with Evolutionary Phonology, perceptual and phonetic data are presented which account for the asymmetries without making any reference to markedness. Since it rejects markedness in diachronic sound change, the present analysis also has broader implications for markedness diachronically and synchronically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a well-known phenomenon of Proto-Tibeto-Burman *s- shifting to /th-/ in several languages and groups of Northeast India and Western Myanmar, most strikingly in the Baric or Bodo-Garo and South Central or Kuk-Chin languages. The distribution of the shift does not follow any likely genealogical lines, and so must be interpreted as areal. In this paper we see that the shift must have occurred in Proto-Baricand Proto-Kuki-Chin, and thus dates to 1,000-1,500 years ago. It is suggested that the original areally spread of the shift involved contact between the Kamarupan state of the Brahmaputra Valley and the urbanized states of the Chindwin Valley.

Copyright of Diachronica is the property of John Benjamins Publishing Co. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Ende is a Central Flores (Austronesian) language of eastern Indonesia which features a contrast between vowel-initial words and words that begin with an underlying glottal stop. The contrast is realized by the insertion of an epenthetic [ɦ-] before vowel-initial words in phrase-initial position. Comparison with the other Central Flores languages shows that the epenthetic Ende [ɦ-] is the regular outcome of what was once a *kl- consonant cluster in Proto-Central Flores. I propose that *kl- clusters underwent a series of sound changes resulting in a segment pronounced [ɦ-], which was reanalyzed as an epenthetic phrase boundary marker instead of a fricative phoneme. The presence and development of epenthetic breathiness in nearby languages such as Keo, Ngadha, Palu'e, Sika, and Kedang will be discussed as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigated a sound change in progress by which the Central Bavarian dialect feature of complementary length between consonant and the preceding vowel is giving way to the unrestricted combination possibility of long (Vː) and short (V) vowels with following longer fortis (Cː) and shorter lenis (C) stops, respectively. This 2 × 2 system is also found in the standard variety of German. While previous studies have regarded any such findings of convergence toward Standard German as being a result of language contact, the present study specifically tested the possibility of fast-speech-induced hypoarticulation being a system-internal driver of this change. The focus of this study was on acoustic cues to the postvocalic stop. Following the apparent-time paradigm, acoustic analyses of 10 younger and 10 older dialect speakers revealed that (1) younger dialect speakers produced both VC and VːCː (both formerly illegal in the dialect), but (2) older dialect speakers produced only VːCː sequences with duration patterns similar to those of the control group of 10 Standard German speakers. Analyses of various dependent variables further showed (3) the (apparently) delayed emergence of aspiration as an additional cue to the fortis–lenis contrast in Western Central Bavarian particularly in younger dialect speakers, (4) no considerable effect of speech rate on the dispersion of and overlap between any of the four vowel-plus-stop combinations, and (5) the irregular spread of this change that appears to be gradual. As such, the findings support a model of linguistic change that also accounts for gradual changes in dialect borrowing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a previous study on voiceless stop aspiration in Heritage Calabrian Italian spoken in Toronto, we found that the transmission of a sociophonetic variable differed from cross-generational phonetic variation induced by increased contact with the majority language. Universal phonetic factors and the social characteristics of the speakers appeared to influence contact-induced variation much more straightforwardly than the transmission of the sociophonetic variable. In the current study, we investigate further, examining possible alternative explanations related to the lexical distribution of the aspiration phenomena. We test two alternative hypotheses, the first one predicting that the diffusion of a majority language's phonetic feature is frequency-driven while change in a sociophonetic feature is not (or not that regularly across generations), and the second one predicting that sociophonetic aspiration decreases across generations by being progressively more dependent on the frequency of lexical items. Our results show that sociophonetic aspiration resists lexicalization and applies to both frequent and infrequent words even in the speech of third-generation speakers. By contrast, the progressive introduction of contact-induced phonetic change is led by high-frequency words. These findings add to the complexity of heritage language phonology by suggesting that the pronunciation features of a heritage language can follow different fates depending on their sociolinguistic roles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article deals with the origin of palatalisation in the plural paradigm of the Khotanese i-declension. According to the common view, palatalisation resulted from regular sound change only in the nominative-accusative plural, with the etymological form of the endings remaining not-palatalised in the rest of the plural inflection. Subsequently, there emerged a tendency for the palatalised allomorph to become generalised and extend across the paradigm. However, a thorough examination of older and later Old Khotanese manuscripts challenges this perspective, revealing no evidence of original allomorphy between the palatalised and non-palatalised stem variants in the plural. This study demonstrates that palatalisation did not originate from analogical levellings but rather arose from regular sound change. Additionally, the article draws a comparison between the i-declension plural paradigm and the inflection of most numerals greater than 'three', which exhibit palatalisation in all case forms except for the nominative-accusative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the phonological history of Tai Nüa can be roughly demonstrated through comparison of its modern dialects against their reconstructed ancestor, namely, Proto-Southwestern Tai, neither the chronology nor the pathway of the transformative sound changes can be established in detail with any certainty. This study demonstrates a more fine-grained understanding of both the chronology and pathway of the sound changes through the examination of the recently available Sino-Baiyi Manual of Translation, a Chinese-Tai Nüa section of bilingual glossary books produced for diplomatic use during the Ming Dynasty. By comparing the phonological inventory of Tai Nüa as attested in this manuscript against the pre-established list of all characterizing sound changes from Proto-Southwestern Tai to Modern Tai Nüa dialects, we chronologize all the sound changes into the pre-16th versus post-16th century changes. Employing the pre- & post-16th century changes as the demarcating criteria, we tentatively propose a tripartite chronological division of Tai Nüa into 1) Old Tai Nüa, 2) Early Modern Tai Nüa, and 3) Modern Tai Nüa dialects.

Inspired by Beddor 2009, this article explores whether and how trading relations between coarticulatory source and effect may serve as a precursor for sound change. It aims at extending the case of vowel nasalization examined by Beddor to the relationship between closure voicing (source) and co-intrinsic pitch (effect). Through four production and perception studies, we show that the inverse source-effect relation observed for vowel nasalization is not found in the voicing contrast of French, a true-voicing language. Instead, we propose that the phonologization of co-intrinsic pitch (a.k.a. tonogenesis) originates from spontaneous devoicing (a production bias), which subsequently triggers an upweighting of pitch (a perceptual adaptation strategy). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most analyses of monophthong change have historically relied on static acoustic measures. It is unclear the extent to which dynamic measures can shed greater light on monophthong change than can already be captured using such static approaches. In this study, we conducted a real-time trend analysis of vowels in corpora collected from female Mainstream Australian English (MAusE) speakers under 30 years of age across three time periods: the 1960s, 1990s, and 2010s. Using three different methods for characterising the first and second formants (the target-based approach, discrete cosine transform (DCT), and generalised additive mixed model (GAMM)), we statistically examined differences for each of 10 monophthongs to outline change over the fifty-year period. Results show that all three methods complement each other in capturing the changing vowel system, with the DCT and GAMM analyses superior in their ability to provide greater nuanced detail that would be overlooked without consideration of dynamicity. However, if consideration of the vowel system as a whole is of interest (i.e., the relationships between the vowels), visualising the vowel space can facilitate interpretation, and this may require reference to static measures. We also acknowledge that locating the source of vowel dynamic differences in sound change involves reference to surrounding phonetic context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines acoustic-articulatory properties of three Korean diphthongal vowels of /we/* ‘외’, /wɛ/ ‘왜’, a nd /we/ ‘웨’ in monosyllabic contexts with and without the onset /h/, produced by young Seoul female and male speakers in their twenties. (/we/* refers to the diphthongized vowel of the previous monophthong /ø/.) Results indicate that the three diphthongs do not significantly differ in various phonetic measures, suggesting that they are largely merged. However, there is some evidence that young speakers still maintain a subtle phonetic difference between the ‘new’ diphthong (/we/*) and one of the ‘old’ diphthongs (/wɛ, we/). The distinctions are further constrained by the onset context, complicating the results. For example, a difference between /we/* and /wɛ/ is observed in articulatory Movement duration only with /h/. Additionally, there is an asymmetry between acoustic and articulatory measures such that a more pronounced distinction between /we/* and one of the ‘old’ diphthongs is observed in the articulatory dimensions, such as Movement duration, Displacement, and Tongue position. Finally, there is no evidence of a gender-related difference that suggests female speakers are leading the merger, while some distinctions between the ‘new’ and the ‘old’ diphthongs are made only by the female speakers, possibly due to their propensity to make distinctions reflected in the orthographic representations. These results are further discussed in their implications for the importance of multi-dimensional phonetic studies and the role of gender in understanding the nuanced extent of merger of the diphthongs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In ongoing sound changes, a coarticulatory effect is often enhanced as the coarticulatory source that gives rise to it wanes. But quite how phonologisation and these reciprocal coarticulatory changes are connected is still poorly understood. The present study addresses this issue through an acoustic analysis of metaphony, which like umlaut has its phonetic origins in VCV coarticulation, and which was analysed in three geographically proximal varieties spoken in the so-called Lausberg area in Southern Italy. The corpus was of 35 speakers producing mostly disyllabic words with phonetically mid stem vowels and suffix vowels that varied in phonetic height. The results of functional principal components analysis applied to the stem vowels’ first two formant frequencies showed a progressively greater enhancement to the vowel stem across the three regions that was characterised by raising, diphthongisation, and then further raising and monophthongisation. Suffix erosion was quantified by counting deletions and the degree of vowel centralisation. The analysis showed a reciprocal relationship between stem enhancement and suffix erosion across, but not within, the three dialects. Overall, the results suggest that a trade-off of cues between suffix and stem vowel has progressed to different degrees between the three varieties.

The near-merger hypothesis has served to explain many situations where other explanations have not sufficed, including mainly those where apparently completed mergers have been reversed. However, the situation in the city of Malaga (Spain) calls for a critical review of the main pitfalls of this hypothesis and for a sociolinguistic reorganisation of sound change to allow for near-demergers. The present work focusses on the reversal of the coronal fricative /θ/ and /s/ merger (Casa ‘house’ = Caza ‘hunting’) that has been widely observed in Malaga. Acoustic-perceptual analysis of the realisations of 54 speakers reveals that a completed phonological merger can, in fact, revert and that acoustic cues do not necessarily indicate a near-merger.

The present contribution bears on the documentation and description of a few unusual sounds, i.e. double labial-velar articulations, in a number of Bantu zone C varieties belonging to the so-called “Sakata cluster” in the southwestern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). These phonemes, often considered typical of a linguistic area known as the “Macro-Sudan Belt”, are considerably more common in southern Central Africa than previously thought. The case of the Sakata varieties at hand represents one of particular interest considering the wide array of labial-velar articulations they present. First, we provide a spectral analysis of the data available to us, discussing the question of whether some of the sounds documented here should be described as labial-velar fricatives. Second, we proceed to review well-established models of sound change to test them against our data, with special focus on kiNgingele. We conclude by proposing that the presence of labial-velars in Sakata is part of a broader set of “uncommon” linguistic features present in northwestern Bantu: this, in turn, might point to the fact that the languages of the region went through stages of greater phonological diversity than suggested by today’s relative homogeneity. Sakata labial-velars may just be one trace of this diversity. Keywords: phonetic documentation, articulatory phonology, Bantu languages, acoustics, sound change

This study challenges the notion of Saek as an aberrant member of Tai by proposing that certain features previously considered archaic are, in fact, contact-induced innovations. Specifically, it argues that multiple correspondences involving /j-/ and the alleged split of the Proto-Tai *A1 tone can be traced back to Vietnamese and Lao or Thai influence. Additionally, this paper asserts that Saek is closely related to Fusui, a Northern Tai dialect spoken in southwestern Guangxi. This paper concludes that Saek is a Tai language with some unique retentions and traces of contact with neighboring languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present an interlinked, expandable database of segmental sound changes among a large sample of Mixtec languages of Mexico. The database provides an up-to-date repository for scholars working on Mixtec and related languages. It serves the wider historical linguistics community by providing a model for managing large data sets in a way that streamlines traditional historical linguistic analysis at the same time as preparing the data for computational and quantitative analysis. We build upon previous studies but also introduce a novel annotation scheme for analyzing sound change in large and complex language groups or families. The database is hosted on GitHub (https://github.com/SAuderset/MixteCaSo) so that it can be improved and expanded on in the future. Publication versions such as this one are archived on Zenodo (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10630996). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Cuadernos de Lingüística de el Colegio de México is the property of El Colegio de Mexico AC and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of BABUR Research is the property of BABUR and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The goal of the paper is to explore, by means of perceptual data, one of the possible intermediate steps, AO (Menéndez Pidal, 1968), in the diachronic sound change AL > AU > AO > O. AO is usually placed after the change AL > AU, as in Middle French (Bretos & Tejedor, 2015) and Middle Castilian (Menéndez Pidal, 1968). Ohala (1981) states that many sound change processes find their root in acoustic similarity, leading to signal misperception by the listener. Interestingly, AL and AU share similar acoustic information that can be misinterpreted (Recasens, 1996). In order to explore signal misperception in AL > AU > AO, and paying special attention to the transition AU and AO, ten subjects had to listen to the following stimuli AL, AO and AU uttered by a female Eastern Catalan speaker at two different speech rates, fast and slow. Subjects were forced to choose between AL, AU and AO in order to specifically explore AU categorization by the participants. Results show that AU can be perceived as AO. If AU is perceived as AO, then it may also be produced as such (Ohala, 1981), thus finding an opening for AO to emerge as another candidate in the sound change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article concerns a presentation of the content and of the results of the phonemicgraphemic analysis of the German records from the second half of the 14th century (1361-1380), which come from the town council of Zgorzelec (Görlitz). The purpose of the paper is to answer the question what the spelling rules in the town chancellery of Zgorzelec are and how the script fixes the features of the spoken language from the past. Due to the analysis, it could be explicitly proved, that the German used in the text matches to the level of evolution of the German language within the periodization of history of the language as it contains the standard Early New High German features as well as the dialectal structures and the sound changes, which are emblematic for the Silesian dialect. The text can therefore be classified as one of the linguistic monuments of the East Central German of Silesian tradition. All the conclusions of the study are supported with the suitable examples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A discussion of the problem of "Altaic" influence on Proto-Slavic is the main focus of this paper. In its first part, chronological and terminological questions are presented; the second part is devoted to etymologies (*baranъ 'ram', *koza 'goat', *klobukъ 'fur cap, hat', *kъlbasa 'sausage', sablja 'sabre'). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the geographical and structural diffusion of “Viennese Monophthongization” (VM). By means of a new numerical measure to assess and compare formant movement in 18 lexical items, we provide evidence that VM is an ongoing, regular sound change transforming [aɛ̯] and [aɔ̯] gradually into [æː] and [ɒː]. Data are based on direct dialect recordings of 76 speakers in two age groups in 19 eastern and central Austrian rural locations. Results indicate that VM is diffusing from Vienna in a wave-like fashion. Even though VM is reported to have been established in other bigger cities for more than 30 years, the data show no evidence of diffusion from these cities. There are also other factors affecting the degree of formant movement: The phonetic-phonological environment (stress and the following consonant) explains most of the variance in the data, whereas no frequency effects could be found. Social identity, cultural space, and gender-related network structures are discussed as additional social factors.

The objectives of this study were to explore the linguistic changes, to discover the value of Pali (PL) and Sanskrit (SKT) loanwords in an old and important epic work entitled "Thao Hung or Cheuang", and to describe the society depicted in this work and its beliefs. The conceptual framework of this study consists of (1) usage of PL-SKT words through sound change theories (2) values of the PL-SKT loanwords applied in Thao Hung or Cheuang and (3) reflections on the society and beliefs of the people in this epic. A qualitative method was employed and the data were collected from volumes 1-4 of the Dictionary of the Vocabulary in the Northeastern Thai Literary Work Thao Hung or Thao Cheuang published by the Royal Society of Thailand. The findings revealed that there are 679 PL-SKT loanwords in the work. The vowel and consonant sound changes were made for the sake melodiousness of the poetry of the work. The values of PL-SKT words can be categorized into five dimensions, namely, 1) language usage 2) word usage 3) sound usage 4) semantic usage and 5) aesthetic usage. The work also reflects the society it depicts, namely: urban society on a plateau which is class-based and agricultural, in which there is gender inequality between men and women and marriage between relatives of the ruling class, and in which there are multiple cultural influences. The following two types of beliefs were found in the society, namely: old beliefs and Brahman and Buddhist beliefs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current study examines the extent to which perceptual factors may account for the emergence of assibilated variants of the alveopalatal approximant /j/ in two geographically remote varieties of Spanish. Participants from Medellin, Colombia and Santiago, Dominican Republic completed a discrimination task and a matched guise. Both tasks presented listeners with stimuli containing affricate [ʤ] and approximant [j] allophones of /j/. Participants were more accurate when discriminating between sound pairs that included the affricate allophone, suggesting that the presence of (af)frication is a salient acoustic cue upon which judgments are reliably made. Therefore, we argue that the emergence of assibilated variants ([ʤ], [ʒ]) can be explained in part by more prominent acoustic cuing and thus greater perceptual salience. Evidence of the relationship between these findings and a possible sound change in progress is observed in the association of social characteristics with [ʤ] and [j]. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Languages throughout the Malayo-Polynesian branch of Austronesian exhibit a range of sound changes which all appear to be triggered by the presence of a schwa in an open penultimate syllable. These changes are gemination of the final-syllable onset, deletion of penultimate schwa in three-or-more syllable words, and the shift of schwa to a full vowel in open penultimate syllables only. The changes are analyzed as a product of drift, whereby changes in daughter languages are motivated by some property of the proto-language. In this case, it is argued that schwa was a zero-mora vowel in Proto-Austronesian and Proto-Malayo-Polynesian, and that these changes worked to add a mora to a word which would otherwise contain a degenerate single-mora foot. The observed changes are then analyzed as a product of constraint promotion modeled in Diachronic Optimality Theory, whereby constraint movement over time may explain historical sound change. In the case of Malayo-Polynesian, it is shown that the promotion of the Binary Foot constraint (Ft-Bin) can explain all three of the attested schwa-triggered sound changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Factors in sound change are still a major subject of debate in the field of linguistics, with the frequency factor perhaps being the most controversial. The present article focuses on palatalization of the velars before high front vowels and glides in Northern Mandarin, because palatalization stretched for more than 100 years and can provide detailed information concerning its contour. Based on a statistical analysis of corpus data of palatalization in Northern Mandarin, the present article argues that the factor of frequency is positively associated with palatalization and the factor of frequency change is negatively associated. Morphosyntactic structure and word class are also claimed to be factors in sound change. However, neither of these two factors has emerged as significant in the current study.

The aim of the paper is a presentation of the content and of the results of the phonemic-graphemic analysis of the German records from the first decade of the second half of the 14th century, which come from the town council of Zgorzelec (Görlitz). The records form a part of the first book of records of the town Zgorzelec. The aim of the article is to answer the question what the spelling rules in the town chancellery of Zgorzelec are and how the script fixes the features of the spoken language from the past. Due to the analysis, it could be explicitly proved, that the German used in the text matches to the level of evolution of the German language within the periodization of history of the language as it contains the standard Early New High German features as well as the dialectal structures and the sound changes, which are typical for the Silesian dialect. The text can therefore be classified as one of the linguistic monuments of the East Central German of Silesian tradition. All the conclusions of the study are supported with the suitable examples.

We advocate for a diachronic typological approach to phonology, arguing that explanation for phonological structure must appeal to dynamic processes. We outline basic assumptions and explanatory mechanisms of this framework and demonstrate its utility by applying it to aspects of consonant phoneme inventory structure. Examining sound change paths through which palatal(ized) and ejective consonants emerge, we show that initial conditions in a language influence the likelihood of a sound change occurring, and that sound change trajectories may differ in their lifespans and the ease with which they are entered into. Regarding more general theoretical issues, we find that focusing on the dynamic processes that create inventories is more likely to produce accurate predictions about the patterns observed than structural generalizations such as feature economy. We conclude that further elucidating the details of sound change will lead to a fuller and more explanatory phonological typology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]