Sound Change (review)

This is a revised and enlarged version of the edition that was published in 1972 under the same title. As noted by the author, ‘[t]he second chapter of the first edition has been removed and the points relevant to the present edition have been shifted to other chapters’, with the result that ‘the chapter on reconstruction is four times its original size’ (ix). With the addition of illustrative examples throughout, the overall length of the volume has been increased by some 70 pages. The present edition is divided into four chapters of approximately equal length, each of which ends with a list of pertinent further readings. This is followed by a series of exercises that bear upon the material presented in each chapter, an appendix listing the various sound changes that were used as examples, a bibliography, and an index.

The author begins with a chapter devoted to ‘Evidence for sound change’. After having identified sound change as ‘a technical term in historical linguistics [which] refers to a change in the pronunciation of sounds’ (1), he goes on to distinguish it from analogical change, sporadic change, and borrowing. He then shows how the direction of sound change can be determined using either an external criterion, which involves the comparison of records belonging to different periods in time, or an internal criterion, which may be either descriptive, i.e. purely language internal, or comparative, i.e. based on specific types of differences between related languages or dialects.

‘Characteristics of sound change’ is the title of the second chapter. For Bhat, the two most important characteristics are regularity—he is an ardent defender of the regularity hypothesis—and irreversibility. He acknowledges that a number of linguists have questioned the validity of these properties but claims that ‘most of their objections derive from a mix up of sound changes with other types of changes that affect sounds in a language like analogy and borrowing’ (24). Two other issues discussed in this section are the putative gradualness and bidirectionality of sound change, both of which the author argues against.

Ch. 3 deals with the ‘Effects of sound change’. Here the author describes ‘five different ways in which the effects of sound change on the sounds of a language can be viewed’ (103). Three of these involve the interaction that an evolving sound can have with other sounds. Thus, one can study the chronological relationship between a sound and its substitute, the syntagmatic relationship between a sound and its neighboring sounds, and the paradigmatic relationship between a sound and the remaining sounds of a language. In addition, he shows how we can examine the way morphophonemic alternations can be affected by sound changes and the effects that these can have on the sets of contrasts that occur in a language.

As the title ‘Reconstruction of sound change’ clearly indicates, Ch. 4 is about the comparative method and internal reconstruction. The author notes that both of these reconstructive techniques are based on the same set of hypotheses, namely that the phonological differences that exist between externally and internally related morphemes can be the result of the split of an original phoneme (to which we may add the deletion of such a phoneme or the addition of a new segment) or the merger of two original phonemes (though this would not normally be recoverable internally). The rest of the discussion in this section revolves around the actual procedures that are used to select the most plausible original sound in any given alternation.

This book is a straightforward, no-frills account of the fundamentals of diachronic phonology. Although the discussion can get a little murky and convoluted in spots, the overall structure is a model of clarity, with each chapter containing an introduction where the issues to be addressed are laid out explicitly and a summary where everything that has been examined is wrapped up neatly. What is particularly refreshing about the author’s approach to the subject is that he shuns the same old tired...