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.

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I'm taking a number of linguistics classes, as well as ESL classes, and will share the noteworthy, the obscure, and occasionally, the silly. But let's start with the silly, shall we? I'm teaching myself the International Phonetic Alphabet. It's rough. The letters are different. The sounds are different. It's, in fact, incredibly difficult to even hear some of the differences between sounds, never mind replicate them. It's all-around one of the hardest things I've ever attempted to do. And they don't make it easy with the naming conventions. How on earth is that last one not called "turned c"??? Le sigh.

Glottal Spot

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