I tried out a couple of other Reddit replacements a few years ago before Lemmy took off, and I really enjoyed the few that had separate votes for "funny" and "insightful/contributes to discussion/whatev".
Yeah it made voting a bit clunkier, but it did a good job of differentiating between two very different ways of positively contributing to a discussion.
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?
Yes, I agree with this statement, and I've already answered this question, but here it is again:
It stopped easing pronunciation as soon as the phonotactic constraints of the language changed to once more allow the sequence that was previously disallowed.
That's the answer.
And, once again, we can test for when this happens by looking for apparent exceptions to the sound rule in question (introduced later by borrowing, analogy, or subsequent regular sound change).
Once apparent exceptions appear, that indicates to us that the phonotactic constraints have changed, and that the sequence is once again being allowed in the language. At that point "easing pronunciation" no longer makes sense as a descriptor of the alternation (as in the case with the a/an alternation).
- This does not mean that it is a regular sound shift. It never was. It always only effected this one word
This is empirically incorrect. It also affected my/mine in exactly the same environment, and at the same time (12th cent. to 14th cent.) because, as mentioned, sound change is regular and exceptionless in its environment.
Now, let me ask you a question.
About the a/an alternation, you say that "in every instance it occurs, it demonstrably eases the pronunciation", but you never say how it eases the pronunciation, or what that even means to you. I, on the other hand, have given you thorough explanations and theoretical underpinnings for my position at every turn.
So, if it "demonstrably eases the pronunciation", then please do demonstate it. What's the strict, rigorous, definition of "easing pronunciation" (or whatever we want to call this) that you're using here, and how is it useful? That is, how does it make useful predictions about the data?
Because currently, your definition feels like something like "it feels better to speakers" or some equally un-useful metric. If "it feels better to speakers" is your definition (which I'm not saying it is - that's why I asked), then "I would have eaten the apple" would have "easier pronunciation" than "I eaten the apple", and I think that's a bad result for your position.
My definition would probably be something like: "a process that leads to a repair of some sort (by addition, deletion, etc.) to avoid a sound string that is disallowed by a language's phonotactics".
No other process would be easing pronunciation, because all other strings would be allowed by the language's phonotactics.
And, since the sound sequence represented by the "a/an" alternation is clearly allowed elsewhere by English's phonotactics, this process cannot, by definition, be easing pronunciation.
If your theoretical framework doesn't allow something that happens, isn't that rather bad for the framework than for reality?
I suppose that depends on one's perspective, but since you're a functionalist, it certainly makes sense that you'd see it that way.
If one's framework doesn't allow something that happens, that's a good thing, because it means that the model is falsifiable, and therefore scientific. Since, as you correctly stated, all models are wrong, it should be the case that a good framework doesn't allow something that happens if you're actually doing science.
This is exactly my problem with Role and Reference Grammar, and functionalism in general - it's not falsifiable. Everything they do is descriptive - they just restate their data a dozen times in a dozen different ways and call it a day, without actually explaining anything. Nothing can prove them wrong, because they never actually say anything in the first place.
Of course they would want their models to be able to account for literally everything that could possibly happen, because they need to have room to describe it, whatever it is, and they don't care about making useful predictions.
Unfortunately, a model that is powerful enough to account for everything is, of course, also too powerful to actually do anything useful.
This is exactly why generative models are so specific and constrained - we want our models to be proven wrong by new data, so that we can revise them into better, more accurate models.
Luckily for me, though, none of the data you've brought up in this comment comes anywhere close to creating a problem for either the regularity of sound change, or generative linguistics in general.
A bit about me in return, I suppose.
I received my PhD in Linguistics in the mid-late 2000s focusing on the core subfields (generative phonology, morphology, and syntax) and historical linguistics, and then worked as an assistant professor for around five years, teaching, publishing, and supervising theses, before finally leaving the field for industry about ten years ago (though I try to stay relatively current on research).
(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.
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.
(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 when speaking fluently. 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.
In the same way, synchronic phonology is also regular, and describable through the same sorts of rules as diachronic phonology (though we should note that these are not describing the same object - synchronic phonological rules describe processes happening in a single human brain, while diachronic sound rules describe relationships between grammars that exist at different points in time, a meta-analysis, hence de Saussure's famous argument about the primacy of synchrony over diachrony).
What this means, in the context of the current conversation, is that if, as you say, the "phonetic easing" process is still active in modern English, you need to be able to provide a regular, exceptionless environment that can describe it.
You've attempted to do this to some degree with your consonant deletion examples (even if your proposed pronunciations for strong "the" and "to" are pretty dicey), but in order to prove that the sound law that produced the a/an alternation is still a regular phonotactic constraint in Modern English, you'll have to provide a regular synchronic sound rule that can exceptionlessly describe the phonetic environment of the constraint in question that leads to the deletion, which I don't think you'll be able to do.
Note that your proposed rule must not be specific to individual lexical items or refer to morphological or syntactic boundaries. This is because:
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. So, syntax first builds the structure of the clause, and then morphology (which does not have access to the syntactic structure (though see Distributed Morphology for modern attempts to unite syntax and morphology)) builds words to fit into the structural positions that syntax built, and then phonology (which similarly cannot see either syntactic or morphological structure) determines the sounds that are sent off to be pronounced by the articulators. (Note that the actual relationships are a bit more complex - see Kiparsky's 1982 book on Cyclic/Lexical Phonology for a famous example that's pretty accessible, but the generalization holds well enough for the data we're dealing with here.)
What this means is that synchronic (and diachronic, for that matter) sound rules only ever apply in phonological environments, that is, to strings of phones and suprasegmental features like tone, stress, etc. (which does include prosody), and not to individual words.
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.
This is why I don't think you'll be able to show that the a/an alternation is still a regular, productive alternation in Modern English. The a/an alternation is not predictable - there is no general rule in English phonology of which its behavior is a subset. A child acquiring English just has to learn that for this specific morpheme, there's an "n" before vowels and no "n" before consonants, and, crucially, no generally describable phonological sequence in the language works this way.
We can test this with the analogy and borrowing tests above. First, through the analogy test, "my/mine" no longer behaves this way, because its behavior has been altered through a combination of analogy and grammaticalization - the sound law clearly no longer holds in its environment, so the phonotactic constraint that produced it is no longer active in the language. Second, and this is admittedly a hypothetical, I don't believe that any new monosyllabic word borrowed into English ending in -an (or -uw or -ij, for that matter) would show the same alternation in any environment, which would again indicate that the phonotactic constraint is no longer active.
All of this is because the regular sound change that originally produced this alternation is really just as fossilized as the medial f/v alternation: neither alternation can be successfully described using exceptionless synchronic sound rules, and must therefore be stored in the lexicon ("fossilized") and learned as exceptions by new acquirers.
(Note: Both of these alternations are morphologically/lexically-conditioned allomorphy, if you're interested.)
I hope this makes sense. Sorry if this was way too much info - it felt nostalgic, like being back in front of my third- and fourth-year undergrad students again, and I got a bit carried away. Also, I like your username. :)
Let me know if anything here is unclear or if you have further questions.
Sorry for the late response - yesterday was a crazy day IRL. I think my reply here is too long, so I'll have to break it into two comments.
You have quite a few serious misconceptions about linguistic concepts in general here, so I'm going to try to go topic by topic to address them, and hopefully by the end the idea will become clearer:
The first serious misconception is your idea that "sound change isn't that regular".
It was discovered in the second half of the 1800s by a German group of young researchers called the Neogrammarians (Junggrammatiker) that sound change is in fact completely regular and exceptionless in its environment. This is called the Neogrammarian Hypothesis, or just "The Regularity of Sound Change", and it's the foundation for all of historical linguistics (as well as being the advance that led to the discovery (by Jan Baudouin de Courtenay and the rest of the oft-ignored Kazan School in the late 1800s) that synchronic phonology is regular as well - which, by the way, is exactly why sound change is regular). Linguistic reconstruction, and even proving that languages are related to each other, is not possible without the assumption of the regularity of sound change (for reasons I can explain if you're interested), and data from around the world has borne out the hypothesis again and again.
Note that when looking at historical data, you will undoubtedly find what appear to be exceptions to the regularity of sound change. These exceptions always occur after the sound change, and are always due to either: 1. Analogical processes or 2. Borrowing/Lexical Innovation.
Note, however, that the initial sound change will have been perfectly regular in its environment (because, again, that's how sound change works), and the later analogical processes have created what only appear to be exceptions to the sound change in question.
(As an aside, it's worth noting that once analogy (or borrowing) begins to create forms that violate the environment for the original sound change, we can conclude that the phonotactic constraint that led to the sound change in question is no longer active in that language's synchronic phonology. This is the answer to your question: "When did it stop ease the articulation?")
(This is often a better test for when "easing articulation" stops than analogy - if a language can borrow a word or alternation with that pattern, then that pattern must not be disallowed by that language's phonotactics any longer.)
If a borrowing happens before a sound change, that borrowed word will undergo the sound change just as any other word of the language will, but if the word is borrowed during/after, it will only undergo the change if the phonotactic constraint (the synchronic realization of a sound change) is still active.
On to an example. I'm so glad you picked "listen" - it's perfect for our purposes. This sound change is completely regular, as it turns out; it's the change that gives us silent "t"s in listen, and soften, and fasten, and whistle, and thistle, pestle, castle, and many others. The environment is easily defined: t > 0 / 'VF_l/n (that is, "t" is deleted after a stressed vowel and a fricative, and before a syllabic (or schwa-supported, if you prefer) n or l, and every single word that fit this pattern at the time this phonotactic constraint was active underwent this change, without exception.
Now, you might very well ask, "What about often? It perfectly fits this environment, but in my dialect (maybe) it's pronounced with the 't'!" What happened here is what's called "spelling pronunciation", which is a type of Analogy.
Once the phonotactics of the language have changed (after all of these 't's have been removed from the language, the phonotactic constraints of the language changed, and these sequences were allowed again (there just weren't any present for a while - an "accidental gap")). Then, speakers a few generations later began to pronounce "often" specifically with a 't' due to its spelling (likely in a misguided attempt to sound more "correct"), and we now have what appears to be an exception to a perfectly regular sound change, even though it's not really an exception - the sound change affected 'often' just the same, but then another process came along and changed it afterward.
(Note that only "often" is affected by this analogical change - analogy is irregular and unpredictable in its effects, unlike sound change. This is because analogy is a lexical process, while sound change is a grammatical process.)
So, to sum up: Yes, sound change is perfectly regular in its environment, and if it looks like it isn't, then either a) You have the wrong environment b) Analogy has affected the output of the change or c) The apparent exception is a borrowing or later creation of some sort. These are all of the possibilities - there aren't any others.
Note that what you've said here:
Language change often effects some words, or a single one but not others.
is technically correct, but only because you're conflating sound change and analogy. Sound change is regular, while analogy is not. (Check out Sturtevant's Paradox for more about this - it's fun, though it's a bit orthogonal to our discussion here.)
I don't think that's accurate, but I'd be happy to see a source proving me wrong. I looked briefly, but wasn't able to find a paper dealing with that alternation specifically (though I didn't look very long, and there may very well be one).
Also, I'm pretty sure that for the dialects that do use "strong the", they also use "strong a" in exactly the same environments, which to my mind makes it a non-issue.
Either way, there are plenty of other ways to get a word-final unstressed schwa followed by a word-initial stressed vowel, and we never see an "n" repair in any of those other situations either - the important point is that this is a process centered entirely around a single lexical item, and it doesn't make sense for a process affecting a single lexical item in a common environment to be "easing pronunciation".
Good questions - hopefully the explanation here helps clarify my position.
To ease pronunciation, we take the older form (containing the consonant at the end) when a vowel follows and the reduced form (without the consonant) when a consonant follows.
We don't, though. This is clear from the fact that "the" occurs in exactly the same phonetic environment (including the lack of stress), with exactly the same vowel, and it doesn't show the same behavior. This data tells us that there's no articulatory reason for this alternation. There is no phonotactic constraint active in English that speakers are getting around with this behavior - the process is specific to a single morpheme.
There are tons of other ways we could make this exact same sequence of unstressed schwa followed by another stressed vowel as well, and in exactly none of them do we ever see an "n" inserted to repair the hiatus the way we do with /r/ in many dialects (which one could analyze as an example of "easing pronunciation", depending on one's assumptions, though I probably wouldn't with all of the deserved stigma around the ill-defined idea of "easing pronunciation"). This is telling us that this alternation has nothing to do with "ease of pronunciation", since speakers clearly don't need their pronunciation eased in this environment.
As for "strong the" specifically, we see a parallel form in "strong a", which can also be argued to end with a yod, and which seems to alternate under the same conditions as "strong the" in most dialects, whatever those conditions are. For this reason, I don't really think "strong the" is very relevant to the discussion.
When the sound change originally took place, of course, it could be argued that it was for "ease of articulation" purposes since the change was regular, but post facto explanations for sound change are always a bit dicey.
So, if you want to argue that the original source of the alternation was "ease of pronunciation", well, sure, maybe, but it's pretty clear from Modern English data that the "a/an" alternation has nothing to do with ease of articulation at all.
It's a dichotomy because something either eases pronunciation, or it doesn't, and in this case, the data makes it clear that it doesn't. It may feel "easier" to speakers because it sounds wrong to them without it, but that's due to morphophonology, not phonotactics, and it's why we rely on tests like the above instead of speaker intuition whenever possible.
How about this: let's take the f/v morphophonemic alternation in leaf/leaves, knife/knives, etc.
There's a decent argument to be made that this medial voicing change in Old English was originally to "ease pronunciation", but once this alternation became morphophonemic, the "ease of articulation" argument falls apart pretty quickly.
I don't think any serious linguist would assert that it's 'life/lives' in Modern English due to "ease of pronunciation" instead of "historical accident" when 'fife/fifes' and countless other later borrowings do not show the same alternation, and the 'a/an' alternation is this exact same sort of morphophonemic process.
So much badlinguistics in this subthread.
Edit: Instead of responding to individual comments, I'll just put what's going on with "a" and "an" here:
This alternation is a morphophonological process (specifically a sandhi alternation), whereby in native, fluent speech for most dialects of English, "a" is unconsciously placed before words beginning with a consonant, and "an" is unconsciously placed before words beginning with a vowel.
In contrast to what many people in this subthread seem to think, this is NOT to "ease pronunciation". This is easily demonstrable since "a" and "the" have the same vowel sound in fluent speech (for most dialects of English), but while we get "a cat" but "an apple", we don't get "the cat", but "then apple". This alternation, therefore, is not a regular part of English speakers' phonology (that is, part of the regular, unconscious processes that occur between sounds in all environments), but rather an idiosyncratic part of English's morphophonology, in that it's a phonological process that only happens in the presence of certain morphemes (simple words or word-pieces).
Why is this the case? Because "an" was originally just the word "one" that became reduced over time until it took on its own separate grammatical function, and later there was a regular sound change whereby "n" was deleted in certain specific unstressed environments before consonants, leaving an accidental alternation between "a" and "an" as a result of sound change.
This means that the "a"/"an" alternation in Modern English is not to "ease pronunciation" in any way - like with many phenomena in English (and all languages for that matter), it's just a vestigial remnant of an accidental historical process.
We know this is the case because the exact same thing happened to "mine", and in earlier dialects of English there was a similar alternation, "my cat", but "mine uncle". This alternation later collapsed in most dialects into our modern my/mine distinction, adding further evidence to the conclusion that this is not a phonological alternation, but a morphophonological one.
What all of this means, is that for a native English speaker that still has an "a/an" distinction (I don't have one in my dialect, for example - I put "a" before everything when speaking fluently: "a cat", "a apple"), if they don't put a pause between "a" and "I'm" to signal the quoted speech, they would likely say "an I'm", and if they do put a pause between "a" and "I'm" to signal the quoted speech, they would likely say "a I'm".
Because "a" and "mindset" aren't in a local configuration to each other, they will have no morphophonological influence on each other whatsoever (just like in "an able mindset", for example).
So, while I won't say that saying "it's 'a' because of 'mindset'" is wrong (because right/wrong aren't really useful terms when describing language), I will say that it does not conform to the linguistic behavior of native English speakers when speaking fluently.
Feel free to respond to this comment with any follow-up questions you have, and I'll be happy to answer them.
Turns out we were living on the Bionis after all