A snippet on phoneme change

TIL that phoneme change doesn't happen gradually like I always thought. I assumed Grimm's Law was a slow burn. When those P's became F's, I thought there was a point in time when people said... something in between a P and an F. Which now that I think about it, makes little sense. What in heck would be between a P and an F??

But no, instead, it happens quickly. A group of people start to pronounce something in a new way. That group increases in size. The previous group dwindles or maybe dies out. Think about how a portion of the English speaking population says the word "think" as "fink?" There was no point in time where people said something in between those two sounds. Will fink ever replace think? Who knows? But it just might...

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Here goes...

I've literally put my money (and my time and sanity) where my mouth is and have started a Masters in Applied Linguistics through OU . (OK, technically, it's an MA in Education with a concentration in AL, but whatevs.) It's a bananas amount of work, considering I'm doing this for fun. I'm going to try posting here regularly in hopes that when I need to write papers I'll have something to draw on. We'll see.

Universal Grammar Basics

I've heard of Universal Grammar, but I have to say, I've never thought it sounded probable. Or, maybe it sounded too probable; something we wanted to be true. "Hey, look! There are reasons we speak this way. It's right ." And I'm not a prescriptivist, so I bristled a bit at the thought of One True Way to speak. Most people who love language love the variety of it. But then I read the research and yeah, it doesn't look entirely like BS. There are four basic principles. Monsieur Jordain's Principle: Like things should be together. The thing that does the action should be somewhere near the action. The words describing a thing should probably be in the same clause as the thing. There are languages that don't follow this as strictly, but they're the exception. Caesar's Principle: The action usually follows our perception of time. The famous example is Caesar's "Veni, Vidi, Vici" - I came, I saw, I conquered. It would make a com...

Here, here!

OK, it hurt just writing that. But really, I do agree with this article , and will be buying this book.

Glottal Spot

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