Talk:Phonemic differentiation


 * Talk:Phonemic differentiation/Archive 1 (March-May 2005)
 * Talk:Phonemic differentiation/Archive 2 (May-December 2005)

this article should be split up and partially combined with other articles
Please see my comments in Tense-lax neutralization. That article is totally misnamed, as its contents are in fact about neutralization in English before 'r', and nothing else. I suggested renaming it to reflect that, and combining the various sections of this article covering 'r' neutralizations in addition to incorporating the separate hoarse-horse and cord-card articles, which are short and where having just a couple of these split out is rather pointless.

In general, the information on English here is way too detailed. This is supposed to be a *general* article about phonemic differentiation. There is far too little of such info -- e.g. the basic distinction between primary and secondary splits is not even mentioned. Furthermore, some of the sound changes discussed are really not relevant -- for example, the "near-square" merger involves neither creation nor deletion of a phoneme, but simply a relatively minor change in possible phoneme environments. And on top of that, some of the most important examples of English phonemic change (the non-rhotic change of c. 1700, i-umlaut of c. 500, palatalization of c. 450, the destruction of all former diphthongs and creation of a huge new set of diphthongs c. 1000-1200) are not mentioned at all!

The stuff on English should be put into a separate article on English sound changes. This article should *list*, not go into detail, the most important changes that added, deleted or significantly altered phonemes, with appropriate links. (E.g. "neutralization before r" would be a *single entry*.)

Please see the discussion in Tense-lax neutralization; I said that I might do the rearranging there if the consensus was in favor and no one else stepped in. The same thing could possibly apply here, too.

Benwing 1 July 2005 18:27 (UTC)


 * Those are all good suggestions, but first I want to bring some of the stubbiest articles on specific mergers and splits back here. I've brought back father-bother and fill-feel/fell-fail because the articles on those were extremely short once all copyvios were removed. After I'm done with that, we can figure out if we want to make a List of major phonemic splits and mergers found in English dialects or the like. --Angr/undefined 1 July 2005 20:58 (UTC)
 * I'm done bringing stubs back into the fold here, so if you want we can start discussing what do with this page. --Angr/undefined 2 July 2005 20:47 (UTC)

I don't quite understand why you reverted the changes to the references. Many of the cases you have listed under "mergers" are conditional mergers of two phonemes in particular environments, aka neutralizations; this is the same thing going on in the tense-lax neutralizations, reduction of h clusters [i.e. neutralization of /h/ and null before a consonant], and many of the other such changes.

Benwing 3 July 2005 06:12 (UTC)

"Null" isn't a phoneme, so deletion of /h/ in certain contexts doesn't fit the definition of a phonemic merger. But you're right about the tense-lax neutralizations; those can be put into the list of mergers with their own page. --Angr/undefined 3 July 2005 07:27 (UTC)

again, please move the english stuff
The stuff on English dialects just doesn't belong here; it goes on a page about English dialects, or some sub-page. If i were looking for the stuff on this page, i'd never look here, but under English dialects. If anything about English goes on this page, it should be a summary of the major phonemic changes over the wider history. Here is a summary of major changes:

---

Old English:

loss of Proto-Germanic diphthongs; development of height-harmonized diphthongs, palatal phonemes, a/ae distinction, front-rounded vowels

Early Middle English:

loss of height-harmonized diphthongs, a/ae distinction, front-rounded vowels; development of new long vowels through open-syllable lengthening; development of new diphthongs from velars and palatals; loss of voiced velar fricative; development of new voiced fricatives (v, z; in Late ME, voiced th); initial cluster loss (hr, hl, hn); development of schwa

Late Middle English:

loss of most diphthongs; great vowel shift, with new diphthongs appearing; development of long back low-mid vowel from former /au/; loss of many occurrences of schwa; further initial cluster loss (wr, gn, kn); loss of consonant gemination

Early Modern English:

loss of voiceless velar fricative, multi-way split of "ough"; development of velar nasal as phoneme; split of short /u/; palatalization of sequences with /j/, gain of new "zh" phoneme; reduction of /sw/, /mb/; shortening of many former long vowels (head, breath, bread, blood, etc.); loss of three-way mate/meat/meet distinction; diphthongization of long mid vowels; fronting of /a/; loss of many vowel distinctions before syllable-final /r/; lengthening of low back rounded vowel before voiced velars and voiceless fricatives (long, log, loss, cloth, off); backing/rounding of /a/ before /l/ (wall, walk); loss of /l/ in certain clusters (/lk/, /lm/)

After American/British split, up through 1900:

British loss of rhotacization; development of a/ae distinction (American unrounding of low back vowel as in "not"; British backing of /a/ before /s/ and sometimes /f/, rhotacization loss); American flapping of /t/; British reduction of /hw/

Post 1900:

Various changes, not yet complete

---

The changes within a particular section are approximately but not completely chronological. This summary in expanded form should go elsewhere in a page about English historical phonology, and possibly (in a perhaps reduced form) on this page.

Angr?

Benwing 15:47, 20 July 2005 (UTC)


 * I'd say everything you have above should be at History of the English language, not here. I'm not sure what should be discussed here. Doing a Google search for <"phonemic differentiation" -wikipedia> reveals that the term doesn't refer to splits at all, as the article says, it refers to the psycholinguistic need to keep phonemes apart from each other, which can be adequately discussed at phoneme. The closest it comes to meaning anything having to do with this page is this quote from http://www.shlrc.mq.edu.au/~felicity/vowelmod_prelateral_environ.pdf:
 * Dark /l/ has the potential to affect preceding vowels to such an extent that loss of phonemic differentiation can result [12]. In AusE this is most clearly seen in the modification of /o / such that "doll" and "dole" become almost homophonous [1].
 * In other words, a merger is the loss of phonemic differentiation, but a split doesn't have anything to do with phonemic differentiation at all. Maybe we can rename this page Phonemic splits and mergers or something; at any rate, there ought to be a general page so that the opening sentence of Cot-caught merger can be:

"The cot-caught merger is a phonemic merger of..."
 * or so at Satem we can say:

"In satem languages, PIE *k and *kʷ were merged into [k]..."
 * and the reader can click the link to find out what the technical terms mean.
 * At any rate, if you want to move these sections out into the pages on the dialects where they happen, you'll get no objection from me. But leave something somewhere for readers to be directed to when they encounter the terms "phonemic merger" and "phonemic split". --Angr/undefined 18:21, 20 July 2005 (UTC)

OK, I expanded that stuff into the History of the English language page, but i'm still not sure what to do with the junk on this page other than that it obviously doesn't belong. The English stuff is just a random list of certain sound changes, in no way either complete or representative. Benwing 07:45, 21 July 2005 (UTC)
 * Well, I think a lot of them can go in "Post-1900: Various changes, not yet complete" section of History of the English language. --Angr/undefined 08:08, 21 July 2005 (UTC)


 * About half of them are already in the list at History of the English language, but the versions here are more detailed and probably more accurate (e.g. for the LOT-CLOTH split the description at History of the English language seems to suggest that all varieties of Modern English have the lengthened vowel in the CLOTH words). Also the sound changes with separate pages should be linked there where appropriate; I've already done this for trap-bath split and rhotic and non-rhotic accents.--JHJ 11:55, 21 July 2005 (UTC)
 * One possibility: rename this page Phonemic splits and mergers as suggested above; move the English-specific material to a new page about phonological differences between English accents (I'm not sure what the best title would be); do the same for the other languages; make sure that all the links that point here for specific mergers (there are quite a few on English English and similar pages) are changed.--JHJ 20:33, 21 July 2005 (UTC)


 * Please fix the mistakes in History of the English language as you find them; my knowledge of RP is not that good. Also, go ahead and add links, redo this page, etc. as you see fit. Benwing 02:15, 22 July 2005 (UTC)

planning on moving/merging parts of this page
Please see Talk:Tense-lax neutralization. Benwing 03:07, 5 August 2005 (UTC)

partially decommissioning this page
as you may notice, i am progressively eliminating much of the info on this page and putting it where it belongs, i.e. in the history sections of the languages described.

Benwing 06:52, 5 August 2005 (UTC)


 * I'm just musing, but a Phonological history of the English language, with a list and short description of all the shifts, splits, and mergers, would be fascinating. Nohat 07:16, 5 August 2005 (UTC)


 * See the relevant parts of History of the English language. — Felix the Cassowary 13:49, 5 August 2005 (UTC)


 * When you've done this, please check the links. I put several links to this page on pages such as English English where particular splits and mergers were relevant.--JHJ 09:15, 5 August 2005 (UTC)


 * To be clear on what the problem was, on pages such as English English there were several links to subsections of this page describing features found in the relevant dialects, for example Phonemic differentiation. These links were broken by the changes, so (maybe as a temporary solution) I've restored the relevant sections to this page.  I considered getting the links to point to History of the English language instead, but I think that would have involved major changes to the structure of that page that I wasn't convinced I liked.  Another solution might be to move the relevant sections to a new page on English dialect phonology.  Please consider this problem before deleting sections from this page.--JHJ 19:41, 15 August 2005 (UTC)

It's very easy to create links to an arbitrary place in a page. See. Basically, you use a div tag with id="foo". Could you undo the stuff you added and instead put links to History of the English language in this fashion? Benwing 05:02, 18 August 2005 (UTC)


 * Done, for foot-strut and father-bother. It seems to me that you can do essentially the same thing for three of the remaining features on this page: lot-cloth, fern-fir-fur and the "fleece merger", all of which are discussed on History of the English language, but please try to check the links at the same time.--JHJ 16:50, 18 August 2005 (UTC)

OK, thanks for doing that. I've gone ahead with the merging of the r-related stuff. See English-language vowel changes before historic r. I'll do the rest soon. Benwing 07:17, 22 August 2005 (UTC)

Tidy up
If the articles phonological change and Phonemic differentiation are kept separate, most of the redirects currently pointing to Phonemic differentiation should instead point either to phonological change or to one of the articles in Category:Splits and mergers in English phonology. jnestorius(talk) 16:22, 22 October 2010 (UTC)