Phonetic Law and Imitation

THE PROUDEST ACHIEVEMENT of linguistic science is the demonstration of the existence of regular phonetic laws. For example, while Middle Westerners pronounce a spirant r before a consonant, as in hard, hurt, horn, natives of the Southeastern states speak such words without an r-sound. The loss of the r is regular in two respects: it has been lost by all speakers of the dialect in question, and it has been lost in all words in which it formerly stood before a consonant; the process exhibits regularity as between speakers and regularity as between words. It has been found that change of sound usually works in this way, and it is assumed by many scholars that it always and necessarily works thus within the limits of a single dialect, within a given period of time, provided the phonetic conditions of the change are fully taken into account. The reasons for this regularity are, however, not yet fully agreed upon. The matter has 'been discussed for more than forty years, and many solutions of the problem or of parts of it have been proposed, but there is apparently as much diversity of opinion now as at the beginning of the debate. In fact a distinguished scholar1 has remarked: On this subjeot able men have made profound guesses, but only guesses after all. The earliest attempt to explain the regularity of sound change was made by Herman Paul, whose Principien der Sprachgeschichte was published first in 1880, and in its fifth edition in 1920. According to Paul 2 we do not acquire and retain a memory picture of the motory sensations involved in the pronunciation of each separate word, but we remember instead the motory sensations connected with the production of each speech sound. Consequently, whenever we utter a given speech sound, in any word, the same mental picture of motory sensations comes to function

Acoustics · Aesthetics · Consonant · French horn · Imitation · Linguistics · Period (music) · Physics · Sound (geography) · Sound change · Vowel · Historical Linguistics and Language Studies · History · Linguistic research and analysis · Linguistics and language evolution · Philosophy · Psychology · Social Psychology

• Exceptions' to exceptionless sound laws

  Open Access•H Craig Melchert•Lingua•1975

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• William Dwight Whitney and the Social Dimension of Lexical Diffusion

  Stephen G Alter•Historiographia Linguistica•2010

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