Cheshirisation
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Sound change and alternation |
|---|
|
General
|
|
Lenition (weakening)
Sonorization (voicing)
Spirantization (assibilation) Rhotacism (change of [z] or [d] to [r]) L-vocalization (change of [l] to [w]) Debuccalization (loss of place) |
|
Elision (loss)
Apheresis (initial)
Syncope (medial) Apocope (final) Haplology (similar syllables) Fusion Cluster reduction Compensatory lengthening |
|
Epenthesis (addition)
Anaptyxis (vowel)
Excrescence (consonant) Prosthesis (initial) Paragoge (final) Unpacking Vowel breaking |
|
Coarticulation
Palatalization (before front vowels) Velarization (before back vowels) Labialization (before rounded vowels) Initial voicing (before a vowel) Final devoicing (before silence) Metaphony (vowel harmony, umlaut) Consonant harmony |
|
Cheshirisation (trace remains)
|
|
Sandhi (boundary change)
|
Cheshirisation, or cheshirization, is a term coined by James Matisoff to refer to a type of sound change, where a trace remains of an otherwise disappeared sound in a word.
Before disappearing, a sound may trigger or prevent some phonetic change in its vicinity that would not otherwise have occurred. For example, in the English word night, the gh sound disappeared, but before or perhaps as it did so it lengthened the vowel i, so that the world is pronounced /ˈnaɪt/ "nite" rather than the /ˈnɪt/ "nit" that would otherwise be expected for a closed syllable. In French, a final n sound disappeared, but left its trace in the nasalization of the preceding vowel, as in vin blanc [vɛ̃ blɑ̃], from historical [vin blank].
The term 'cheshirisation' refers to the Cheshire Cat, a character in the book Alice in Wonderland, who "vanished quite slowly, beginning with the end of the tail, and ending with the grin, which remained some time after the rest of it had gone." Although not an established scientific term, the word is used for phonological remnants such as the umlaut in Germanic languages (a lost suffix i changed the plural of foot to feet and of mouse to mice); consonant mutation in Celtic (a lost vowel triggered initial consonant lenition, and a lost nasal triggered nasalisation); the prevention of sound change by a lost consonant in Lahu; floating tones, which are the remains of entire disappeared syllables; and the tone split of Chinese languages, where voiced consonants lowered the tone of a syllable and subsequently lost their voicing.
[edit] References
- James Matisoff, 1991, "Areal and universal dimensions of grammatization in Lahu." In Approaches to grammaticalization, Traugott & Heine, eds. John Benjamins, pp 383–453.
- Östen Dahl, 2004, The Growth and Maintenance of Linguistic Complexity. John Benjamins, p. 170.
- Aleksandra Aikhenvald & Robert M. W. Dixon, 2006, Areal diffusion and genetic inheritance: problems in comparative linguistics. Oxford University Press, p. 344.
- John H. McWhorter, Defining Creole, Oxford University Press, p. 12-13.
