First, I got most of my linguistics education in German so sorry for my bad example when I was looking for an English one. If that’s OK, I would use German ones from now on and try to give enough context.
Neogrammarian Hypothesis
I’m aware of this school of thought, I just didn’t know people still subscribe to it. The narrative I was tought in uni was that when linguists found the first sound shift (Grimm’s Law) and the second one (High German Consonant Shift) and the one in between (Verner’s Law), they were hyped and felt they can math out everything, like a world formula, everything can be determined. But at some point, they realized it’s much more messy and while there certainly are rules that work at a birds view level, the devil is in the detail and this approach can’t explain every individual word. This might be a philosophical question tho: Is everything regular but we don’t know all the rule or are there “real” exceptions?
I’m aware of borrowing and analogy but a factor you forgot to address is frequency. Frequently used words tend to get shortened and infrequently used words get more regular. I know this happens in English as well, but I rather use a German example than a bad English one: “haben” used to mean “to own” but when it became an auxiliary verb (as “to have” did in English), many forms got shortened and now form a paradigm unique in German (there is no analogy here). The “b” is omitted in 2nd and 3rd singular but not in 2nd plural which normally is the same as 3sg. Also: 1pl “(wir) haben” turns colloquial to “ham” while infinite and 3pl stay “haben”. No regular sound shift or analogy or borrowing, just shortening of frequent words.
Verbs will shift between strong and weak conjugation: “küren” used to mean “to choose” and was a strong verb, now it has a specific meaning “to reward someone in a competition” and is more regular (unlike your outdated Sturtevant’s Paradox paper suggests ;) ). “Preisen” (to praise) is a loan word that turned into a strong verb.
And I know strong/weak verbs are analogy (while “haben” is not!), this points to a misunderstanding we seem to have: when I say “regular” I mean deterministic, you seem to mean there is a pool of rules you can pick and choose (different ways to get less regular for example). Chess is rule based as in you can’t just move anywhere but there are still many options and maybe you castle a second time and no one notices. In German we sometimes differentiate between “Labyrinth” and “Irrgarten”. In the former, there is always only one path but you feel lost anyway. This is how my 19th century countrymen thought of language change. In the latter, you have many crossroads and can end up in different places. I hope this analogy makes sense. I don’t know if this difference also exists in English. And honesty, your “analogy to written language” (which I would rather call hypercorrectism but you can argue it’s an analogy) is so arbitrary, at that point you can just argue anything and call it a rule, which is fine, there certainly is influence which I would rather call a tendency than a rule. BTW you could as well argue that this is loaned from a dialect that didn’t make the shift but I don’t know the data for that, might be wrong.
So, in order for the “ease of pronunciation” constraint you’re referring to here to still be active in Modern English, it must be describable as a phonological rule that applies exceptionlessly in a specific phonological environment, regardless of the words or structures that are actually present.
You repeat that like a dogma but don’t give any logical explanation. As I tried to illustrate above, next to the bird eye view of regular sound shifts, frequent words will often work in their own logic because the more frequent a word is, the more important to – you guessed it – ease its pronunciation. I don’t see how “easing the pronunciation” only applies to regular sound shifts and not to the shortening of frequent words (which also is part of language change).
Or to put it differently: I think you said at one point that it is a relic that used to ease the pronunciation but not anymore. Is that a statement you agree to? Because if so, when did it stop to do that and turned into a relic? That’s what I meant when I said you make it into a dichotomy: it’s a continuum and the a/an alteernation is closer to its beginning than to fossilization because it certainly still does the job and follows the same rule it used to, even tho it is the only word that follows this rule. If it only occurs in some lexemes (and I don’t mean the lexeme “a” but the following one), then it is fossilized. Makes me wonder: Do you say “another” in your variety or “a other”? Because that would rather fit the v/f-example for me (especially if the “o” shifted to “wa” and there was no hiatus eitherway, just to illustrate my point not that this was a likely shift).
So sum things up:
There are different processes at play in language change
They are rule based in the sense that we can describe and label the rules, but not in the sense that they are deterministic
Some processes have the purpose to ease the pronunciation, these include regular sound changes and shortening of frequent words
regular sound changes gave us “one”, shortening of frequent words gave us “a(n)”, the 5th most frequent word of the English language and counting
the a/an alternation is very much rule based and in every instance it occurs, it demonstrably eases the pronunciation
This does not mean that it is a regular sound shift. It never was. It always only effected this one word
Sound changes and “easing the pronunciation” is not synonymous and the implication goes in neither direction. This is beside the point but some shifts have the benefit on the listener’s side, not necessarily the speaker’s
It’s traditionally assumed by most generative linguists that the grammar is largely modular - that is, each phase of the generation of an utterance is separate, and proceeds one at a time with little overlap between the modules.
Not that this matters to my argument but a little “fun fact” about me: While most of my lectures were given by generative linguists, my master thesis was about Role and Reference Grammar, a framework that explicitly tries to link morphology, syntax and pragmatics more closely together (phonology explicitly not tho). I currently read a book that includes prototype theory from cognitive linguistics which also is created in opposition to generative linguistics. I know this is still the predominant school of thought but I wish it wasn’t. My master thesis was in Applied Computer Linguistics (with a strong emphasis on “computer” on my part tbh) and I also worked with Sumerian there too as you might have guessed :)
But to your point: If your theoretical framework doesn’t allow something that happens, isn’t that rather bad for the framework than for reality? Some famous guy once said: All models are wrong but some models are useful. Well, yours doesn’t seem to be in this instance.
To start off, its clear that our theoretical assumptions are irreconcilable (I might go so far as to say “diametrically opposed”), and that we are not going to agree here, but its important to note that my model is perfectly able to capture your German data.
First, I got most of my linguistics education in German so sorry for my bad example when I was looking for an English one.
It was a great example. There’s no such thing as a bad example, because sound change is equally regular in every natural human language.
Yes, the vast majority of theoretical linguists, and practically all historical linguistics, both in America and in Europe (with much of the best European work still coming from Germany and the Netherlands), very much still subscribe to the regularity of sound change, because as far as we can tell, it’s an empirical fact.
Also note that it’s impossible to prove language relatedness without the regularity of sound change. Regularity of correspondence is literally the only metric we have that can prove relatedness, so if the Neogrammarian Hypothesis were somehow disproven (which is very unlikely), then the scientific underpinnings of the way we group languages into families immediately collapses.
(Also, yes, hypercorrection is another form of analogy, often called “interdialectic analogy”.)
This might be a philosophical question tho: Is everything regular but we don’t know all the rule or are there “real” exceptions?
This is a great question, and technically it’s still unproven (and may never be), but the hypothesis has been borne out in so much data for so many decades, with no convincing counterexamples, that there seems to be no good reason to disbelieve it.
OH! I should include the most important reason why the regularity of sound change is considered by most western linguists to be scientifically reliable - it makes predictions that are borne out by new data.
####The Case of the Indo-European laryngeals
(This is an oversimplication of the events, because the data is complex and goes beyond the scope of our discussion here, but the (wikipedia page)[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laryngeal_theory] is fairly good if you’re interested.)
Basically, in the late 1800s, scholars working on reconstructing Proto-Indo-European were a bit confused - the reconstructed sound system (which is reconstructible, of course, due to the regularity of sound change) seemed to have two different systems of vowel alternations - a system unheard of in any of the world’s languages.
Ferdinand de Saussure (yes, that Ferdinand de Saussure) realized that he could collapse both systems into one by positing an unspecified series of sonorant consonants (his famous coefficients sonantiques) that colored adjacent vowels in specific environments before disappearing entirely in all of the daughter languages. This resulted in a much simpler system that was also more typologically likely.
His contemporaries ridiculed him for reconstructing a proto-sound that disappeared in all of the daughter languages, but, once Hittite was deciphered in the early 1900s, shortly after de Saussure died, every single place de Saussure had predicted his “coefficients sonantiques” to show up in the proto-language, Hittite had an “h”.
None of this is possible without the regularity of sound change, and we’ve seen the theory make predictions that are borne out by new data again and again.
Yes, linguists very much still subscribe to the regularity of sound change, both in the US and in Europe.
a factor you forgot to address is frequency
I didn’t forget anything. While frequency is clearly a factor in language change, it’s not relevant for sound change since it reduces to a prosody/stress change, which is a describable regular phonological environment that can be acted upon by regular sound rules.
In your “haben” example, for example, the grammaticalization of a main verb to an auxiliary verb clearly establishes a new prosodic pattern, which can be acted upon by regular sound change to the exclusion of other main verbs.
We see similar alternations in English main/auxiliary verb pairs:
I’ve already eaten. BUT
*I’ve a cheesburger. (In American English - Brits can do this)
I’m gonna eat a cheeseburger. BUT
*I’m gonna the store.
This is, of course, expected, since the grammaticalization of main verbs into auxiliary verbs results in a different stress/prosodic pattern (which I’m sure you can feel in German with “haben” as well), and so it’s a perfect location for a regular and exceptionless sound rule to occur.
And these phenomena (and likely “haben”'s case also, though I’m not familiar with the literature) have been thoroughly treated in generative and historical literature perfectly satisfactorily for exactly this reason.
This is a common mistake made by those trying to “disprove” the Regularity of Sound Change - they don’t invest enough time in phonology to understand that phonological domains larger than the word exist. It’s actually kind of funny how elementary all of the “counterexamples” critics bring up always are - you’d think people would understand that a field that’s over two hundred years old would have come across auxiliary verbs at some point during that time.
Also, you’ve asserted that “haben”'s change is not due to analogy or interdialectic borrowing, but I’m not sure where your certainty is coming from here. Without looking more deeply into the phenomenon, at this point the data you’ve presented could easily be described by sound change, analogy, or borrowing, and though I’m not familiar with that data specifically, I have no doubt that one or a combination of the three fully explains the data (because, again, one or a combination of the three fully explains literally all historical data that we’ve found so far).
You repeat that like a dogma but don’t give any logical explanation.
I mean, it’s an empirical fact of language going all the way back to de Saussure and Jan Boudoin de Courtenay’s insight that phonemes have regular and predictable relationships with their allophones, but luckily there’s also a clear physiological explanation for the regularity of synchronic phonology as well. (It’s interesting that you’re so interested in “explanation” now, but we’ll get to that later).
The explanation comes from a combination of the nature of the movement of the articulators, and the fact that (as de Saussure famously noted), language is a regular system composed entirely of contrasts.
Humans articulate language by moving their articulators in a surprisingly small number of regular, precise, complex movements that they have been practicing since they acquired their language in childhood.
These movements eventually become second nature to the speakers, but humans always feel a constant pull between wanting the system to be as simple as possible (leading to regular sound change - our “ease of articulation” here), and wanting the system to have enough contrasts to adequately encode meaning.
That’s why phonology is regular. That’s it. It’s a consequence of the nature of human articulation. Every time an American English speaker pronounces a /t/ between a stressed vowel and an unstressed vowel in a word, that /t/ becomes a flap, because of these millions of practiced, unconscious movements.
Note that this also means that American English speakers literally cannot (without practice) produce a different /t/ allophone in that position in one specific word. If the pronunciation of intervocalic /t/ were to change in one word, it must change in all of them (unless a different specific environment catalyzes a different regular change), because that sequence of articulator movements functions as a single unit.
Once again, it’s an empirical fact that phonology is regular, and the regularity of sound change follows from it.
Also, the fact that synchronic phonology is regular is further proven by the fact that it’s difficult to pronounce foreign language sounds. The mechanism is the same: we are only accustomed to pronouncing the relatively small set of regular movements in our native language, and altering those is difficult. It’s just as difficult, if not more so, to spontaneously begin pronouncing one word in a way that doesn’t conform to a language’s phonotactics.
First, I got most of my linguistics education in German so sorry for my bad example when I was looking for an English one. If that’s OK, I would use German ones from now on and try to give enough context.
I’m aware of this school of thought, I just didn’t know people still subscribe to it. The narrative I was tought in uni was that when linguists found the first sound shift (Grimm’s Law) and the second one (High German Consonant Shift) and the one in between (Verner’s Law), they were hyped and felt they can math out everything, like a world formula, everything can be determined. But at some point, they realized it’s much more messy and while there certainly are rules that work at a birds view level, the devil is in the detail and this approach can’t explain every individual word. This might be a philosophical question tho: Is everything regular but we don’t know all the rule or are there “real” exceptions?
I’m aware of borrowing and analogy but a factor you forgot to address is frequency. Frequently used words tend to get shortened and infrequently used words get more regular. I know this happens in English as well, but I rather use a German example than a bad English one: “haben” used to mean “to own” but when it became an auxiliary verb (as “to have” did in English), many forms got shortened and now form a paradigm unique in German (there is no analogy here). The “b” is omitted in 2nd and 3rd singular but not in 2nd plural which normally is the same as 3sg. Also: 1pl “(wir) haben” turns colloquial to “ham” while infinite and 3pl stay “haben”. No regular sound shift or analogy or borrowing, just shortening of frequent words.
Verbs will shift between strong and weak conjugation: “küren” used to mean “to choose” and was a strong verb, now it has a specific meaning “to reward someone in a competition” and is more regular (unlike your outdated Sturtevant’s Paradox paper suggests ;) ). “Preisen” (to praise) is a loan word that turned into a strong verb.
And I know strong/weak verbs are analogy (while “haben” is not!), this points to a misunderstanding we seem to have: when I say “regular” I mean deterministic, you seem to mean there is a pool of rules you can pick and choose (different ways to get less regular for example). Chess is rule based as in you can’t just move anywhere but there are still many options and maybe you castle a second time and no one notices. In German we sometimes differentiate between “Labyrinth” and “Irrgarten”. In the former, there is always only one path but you feel lost anyway. This is how my 19th century countrymen thought of language change. In the latter, you have many crossroads and can end up in different places. I hope this analogy makes sense. I don’t know if this difference also exists in English. And honesty, your “analogy to written language” (which I would rather call hypercorrectism but you can argue it’s an analogy) is so arbitrary, at that point you can just argue anything and call it a rule, which is fine, there certainly is influence which I would rather call a tendency than a rule. BTW you could as well argue that this is loaned from a dialect that didn’t make the shift but I don’t know the data for that, might be wrong.
You repeat that like a dogma but don’t give any logical explanation. As I tried to illustrate above, next to the bird eye view of regular sound shifts, frequent words will often work in their own logic because the more frequent a word is, the more important to – you guessed it – ease its pronunciation. I don’t see how “easing the pronunciation” only applies to regular sound shifts and not to the shortening of frequent words (which also is part of language change).
Or to put it differently: I think you said at one point that it is a relic that used to ease the pronunciation but not anymore. Is that a statement you agree to? Because if so, when did it stop to do that and turned into a relic? That’s what I meant when I said you make it into a dichotomy: it’s a continuum and the a/an alteernation is closer to its beginning than to fossilization because it certainly still does the job and follows the same rule it used to, even tho it is the only word that follows this rule. If it only occurs in some lexemes (and I don’t mean the lexeme “a” but the following one), then it is fossilized. Makes me wonder: Do you say “another” in your variety or “a other”? Because that would rather fit the v/f-example for me (especially if the “o” shifted to “wa” and there was no hiatus eitherway, just to illustrate my point not that this was a likely shift).
So sum things up:
Not that this matters to my argument but a little “fun fact” about me: While most of my lectures were given by generative linguists, my master thesis was about Role and Reference Grammar, a framework that explicitly tries to link morphology, syntax and pragmatics more closely together (phonology explicitly not tho). I currently read a book that includes prototype theory from cognitive linguistics which also is created in opposition to generative linguistics. I know this is still the predominant school of thought but I wish it wasn’t. My master thesis was in Applied Computer Linguistics (with a strong emphasis on “computer” on my part tbh) and I also worked with Sumerian there too as you might have guessed :)
But to your point: If your theoretical framework doesn’t allow something that happens, isn’t that rather bad for the framework than for reality? Some famous guy once said: All models are wrong but some models are useful. Well, yours doesn’t seem to be in this instance.
(Two more comments this time as well.)
To start off, its clear that our theoretical assumptions are irreconcilable (I might go so far as to say “diametrically opposed”), and that we are not going to agree here, but its important to note that my model is perfectly able to capture your German data.
It was a great example. There’s no such thing as a bad example, because sound change is equally regular in every natural human language.
Yes, the vast majority of theoretical linguists, and practically all historical linguistics, both in America and in Europe (with much of the best European work still coming from Germany and the Netherlands), very much still subscribe to the regularity of sound change, because as far as we can tell, it’s an empirical fact.
Also note that it’s impossible to prove language relatedness without the regularity of sound change. Regularity of correspondence is literally the only metric we have that can prove relatedness, so if the Neogrammarian Hypothesis were somehow disproven (which is very unlikely), then the scientific underpinnings of the way we group languages into families immediately collapses.
(Also, yes, hypercorrection is another form of analogy, often called “interdialectic analogy”.)
This is a great question, and technically it’s still unproven (and may never be), but the hypothesis has been borne out in so much data for so many decades, with no convincing counterexamples, that there seems to be no good reason to disbelieve it.
OH! I should include the most important reason why the regularity of sound change is considered by most western linguists to be scientifically reliable - it makes predictions that are borne out by new data.
####The Case of the Indo-European laryngeals
(This is an oversimplication of the events, because the data is complex and goes beyond the scope of our discussion here, but the (wikipedia page)[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laryngeal_theory] is fairly good if you’re interested.)
Basically, in the late 1800s, scholars working on reconstructing Proto-Indo-European were a bit confused - the reconstructed sound system (which is reconstructible, of course, due to the regularity of sound change) seemed to have two different systems of vowel alternations - a system unheard of in any of the world’s languages.
Ferdinand de Saussure (yes, that Ferdinand de Saussure) realized that he could collapse both systems into one by positing an unspecified series of sonorant consonants (his famous coefficients sonantiques) that colored adjacent vowels in specific environments before disappearing entirely in all of the daughter languages. This resulted in a much simpler system that was also more typologically likely.
His contemporaries ridiculed him for reconstructing a proto-sound that disappeared in all of the daughter languages, but, once Hittite was deciphered in the early 1900s, shortly after de Saussure died, every single place de Saussure had predicted his “coefficients sonantiques” to show up in the proto-language, Hittite had an “h”.
None of this is possible without the regularity of sound change, and we’ve seen the theory make predictions that are borne out by new data again and again.
Yes, linguists very much still subscribe to the regularity of sound change, both in the US and in Europe.
I didn’t forget anything. While frequency is clearly a factor in language change, it’s not relevant for sound change since it reduces to a prosody/stress change, which is a describable regular phonological environment that can be acted upon by regular sound rules.
In your “haben” example, for example, the grammaticalization of a main verb to an auxiliary verb clearly establishes a new prosodic pattern, which can be acted upon by regular sound change to the exclusion of other main verbs.
We see similar alternations in English main/auxiliary verb pairs:
I’ve already eaten. BUT
*I’ve a cheesburger. (In American English - Brits can do this)
I’m gonna eat a cheeseburger. BUT
*I’m gonna the store.
This is, of course, expected, since the grammaticalization of main verbs into auxiliary verbs results in a different stress/prosodic pattern (which I’m sure you can feel in German with “haben” as well), and so it’s a perfect location for a regular and exceptionless sound rule to occur.
And these phenomena (and likely “haben”'s case also, though I’m not familiar with the literature) have been thoroughly treated in generative and historical literature perfectly satisfactorily for exactly this reason.
This is a common mistake made by those trying to “disprove” the Regularity of Sound Change - they don’t invest enough time in phonology to understand that phonological domains larger than the word exist. It’s actually kind of funny how elementary all of the “counterexamples” critics bring up always are - you’d think people would understand that a field that’s over two hundred years old would have come across auxiliary verbs at some point during that time.
Also, you’ve asserted that “haben”'s change is not due to analogy or interdialectic borrowing, but I’m not sure where your certainty is coming from here. Without looking more deeply into the phenomenon, at this point the data you’ve presented could easily be described by sound change, analogy, or borrowing, and though I’m not familiar with that data specifically, I have no doubt that one or a combination of the three fully explains the data (because, again, one or a combination of the three fully explains literally all historical data that we’ve found so far).
I mean, it’s an empirical fact of language going all the way back to de Saussure and Jan Boudoin de Courtenay’s insight that phonemes have regular and predictable relationships with their allophones, but luckily there’s also a clear physiological explanation for the regularity of synchronic phonology as well. (It’s interesting that you’re so interested in “explanation” now, but we’ll get to that later).
The explanation comes from a combination of the nature of the movement of the articulators, and the fact that (as de Saussure famously noted), language is a regular system composed entirely of contrasts.
Humans articulate language by moving their articulators in a surprisingly small number of regular, precise, complex movements that they have been practicing since they acquired their language in childhood.
These movements eventually become second nature to the speakers, but humans always feel a constant pull between wanting the system to be as simple as possible (leading to regular sound change - our “ease of articulation” here), and wanting the system to have enough contrasts to adequately encode meaning.
That’s why phonology is regular. That’s it. It’s a consequence of the nature of human articulation. Every time an American English speaker pronounces a /t/ between a stressed vowel and an unstressed vowel in a word, that /t/ becomes a flap, because of these millions of practiced, unconscious movements.
Note that this also means that American English speakers literally cannot (without practice) produce a different /t/ allophone in that position in one specific word. If the pronunciation of intervocalic /t/ were to change in one word, it must change in all of them (unless a different specific environment catalyzes a different regular change), because that sequence of articulator movements functions as a single unit.
Once again, it’s an empirical fact that phonology is regular, and the regularity of sound change follows from it.
Also, the fact that synchronic phonology is regular is further proven by the fact that it’s difficult to pronounce foreign language sounds. The mechanism is the same: we are only accustomed to pronouncing the relatively small set of regular movements in our native language, and altering those is difficult. It’s just as difficult, if not more so, to spontaneously begin pronouncing one word in a way that doesn’t conform to a language’s phonotactics.