One “parochial” constraint in Germanic is the absence of branching onsets consisting of a coronal stop followed by \/l\/. Thus \/pl, bl, kl, gl\/ are all common in Germanic, but *tl and *dl are not. It is difficult to understand what might gives rise to this phonotactic gap.<\/p>\n
Blevins & Grawunder (2009), henceforth B&G, note that in portions of Saxony and points south, *kl has in fact shifted to [tl] and *gl to [dl]. This sound change has been noted in passing by several linguists, going back to at least the 19th century. This change has the hallmarks of a change from below<\/em>: it does not appear to be subject to social evaluation and is not subject to “correction” in careful speech styles. B&G also note that many varieties of English have undergone this change; according to Wright, it could be found in parts of east Yorkshire. Similarly, no social stigma seems to have attached to this pronunciation, and B&G suggest it may have even made its way into American English. B&G argue that since it has occurred at least twice, KL > TL is a natural<\/em>\u00a0sound change in the relevant sense.<\/p>\n Of particular interest to me is B&G’s claim that one structural factor supporting *KL > TL is the absence of TL in Germanic before this change; in all known instances of *KL > TL, the preceding stage of the language lacked (contrastive) TL. While many linguists have argued that TL is universally marked, and that its absence in Germanic is a structural gap<\/em> in the relevant sense, this does not seem to be borne out by quantitative typology of a wide range of language families.<\/p>\n Of course, other phonotactic gaps, even statistically robust ones, also are similarly filled with ease.<\/a> I submit that evidence of this sort suggests that phonologists habitually overestimate the “structural” nature of phonotactic gaps.<\/p>\n Blevins, J. and Grawunder, S. 2009. *KL > TL sound change in Germanic and elsewhere: descriptions, explanations, and implications. Linguistic Typology\u00a0<\/em>13: 267-303.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" One “parochial” constraint in Germanic is the absence of branching onsets consisting of a coronal stop followed by \/l\/. Thus \/pl, bl, kl, gl\/ are all common in Germanic, but *tl and *dl are not. It is difficult to understand what might gives rise to this phonotactic gap. Blevins & Grawunder (2009), henceforth B&G, note … Continue reading “On the Germanic *tl gap”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1220","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-language","category-phonology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1220","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1220"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1220\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1221,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1220\/revisions\/1221"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1220"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1220"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1220"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}References<\/h1>\n