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Many phonetic changes provide the raw ingredients for later phonemic innovations. In Proto-Italic, for example, intervocalic */s/ became *[z]. It was a phonetic change, merely a mild and superficial complication in the phonological system, but when *[z] merged with */r/, the effect on the phonological system was greater.
On account of the above, the vowel inventory changes from /iː i eː e a aː o oː u uː/ to /i ɪ e ɛ a ɔ o ʊ u/, with pre-existing differences in vowel quality achieving phonemic status and with no distinction between original /a/ and /aː/. Additionally:
In historical linguistics, a sound change is a change in the pronunciation of a language. A sound change can involve the replacement of one speech sound (or, more generally, one phonetic feature value) by a different one (called phonetic change) or a more general change to the speech sounds that exist (phonological change), such as the merger of two sounds or the creation of a new sound.
In phonology, fronting is a sound change in which a vowel or consonant becomes fronted, advanced or pronounced further to the front of the vocal tract than some reference point. The opposite situation, in which a sound becomes pronounced further to the back of the vocal tract, is called backing or retraction .
Tone sandhi is a phonological change that occurs in tonal languages. It involves changes to the tones assigned to individual words or morphemes, based on the pronunciation of adjacent words or morphemes. This change typically simplifies a bidirectional tone into a one-directional tone.
Part of the phonological study of a language therefore involves looking at data (phonetic transcriptions of the speech of native speakers) and trying to deduce what the underlying phonemes are and what the sound inventory of the language is. The presence or absence of minimal pairs, as mentioned above, is a frequently used criterion for ...
Sound change—i.e., change in the pronunciation of phonemes—can lead to phonological change (i.e., change in the relationships between phonemes within the structure of a language). For instance, if the pronunciation of one phoneme changes to become identical to that of another phoneme, the two original phonemes can merge into a single ...
The official chart of the IPA, revised in 2020. The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script.It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standard written representation for the sounds of speech. [1]