Historical Linguistics 3130 A

Common sound changes

I will be doing a review sheet for these later today, but these are the sound changes you need to know from Section 2.7 of the textbook:

• affrication, deaffrication
• apocope
• compensatory lengthening
• epenthesis, syncope
• voicing, devoicing (esp. final devoicing)
• lenition (weakening), fortition (also called strengthening)
• gemination, degemination
• intervocalic voicing
• diphthongization, monophthongization
• lengthening, shortening
• nasal assimilation (esp. homorganic nasal assimilation)
• nasalization, [denasalization]
• palatalization
• rhotacism
• vowel lowering, vowel raising
• backing, fronting
• umlaut (a type of vowel harmony)

You should know about the types of assimilation and dissimilation on the first review sheet.

You should be aware of ablaut (also known as vowel gradation), since we talked about it in class.

Rounding and unrounding (of vowels) and deletion/insertion should be fairly obvious, even if they didn't have their own little section in the book.

If you want another explanation in addition to what's in the textbook, the uOttawa library has the The Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics online. (You'll need to sign in with your library user name (the part of and password unless you're on campus.) If you're going to do several searches there, be sure to choose "Search this book" under the search box or you'll get results from all kinds of irrelevant books.