{"id":1197,"date":"2022-01-30T19:54:16","date_gmt":"2022-01-30T19:54:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/?p=1197"},"modified":"2022-02-01T13:43:25","modified_gmt":"2022-02-01T13:43:25","slug":"phonotactics-in-language-change","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/phonotactics-in-language-change\/","title":{"rendered":"The role of phonotactics in language change"},"content":{"rendered":"

How does phonotactic knowledge influence the path taken by language change?\u00a0As is often the case, the null hypothesis seems to be simply that it doesn’t. Perhaps speakers have projected a phonotactic constraint\u00a0C<\/em> into the grammar of Old English, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that Middle English\u00a0<\/em>will conform to\u00a0C<\/em>, or even that Middle English won’t freely borrow words that flagrantly violate\u00a0C<\/em>.<\/p>\n

One case comes from the history of English. As is well known, modern English \/\u0283\/ descends from Old English sk<\/em>; modern instances of word-initial\u00a0sk<\/em> are mostly borrowed from Dutch (e.g., skipper<\/em>) or Norse (e.g., ski<\/em>);\u00a0sky<\/em> was borrowed from an Old Norse word meaning ‘cloud’ (which tells you a lot about the weather in the Danelaw). Furthermore, Old English forbids super-heavy long vowel-consonant cluster rimes. Because the one major source for \/\u0283\/ is\u00a0sk<\/em>, and because a word-final long vowel followed by\u00a0sk\u00a0<\/em>was unheard of, V\u0304\u0283# was rare in Middle English and word-final sequences of tense vowels followed by [\u0283] are still rare in Modern English (Iverson & Salmons 2005). Of course there are exceptions, but according to Iverson & Salmons, they tend to:<\/p>\n