Umlaut A common example of transphonologisation is
umlaut. ;Germanic In many
Germanic languages around 500–700 AD, a sound change fronted a back vowel when an or followed in the next syllable. Typically, the or was then lost, leading to a situation where a trace of the original or remains in the fronted quality of the preceding vowel. Alternatively, a distinction formerly expressed through the presence or absence of an or suffix was then re-expressed as a distinction between a front or back vowel. As a specific instance of this, in prehistoric
Old English, a certain class of nouns was marked by an suffix in the (nominative) plural, but had no suffix in the (nominative) singular. A word like "mouse", for example, had a plural "mice". After umlaut, the plural became pronounced , where the long back vowel was fronted, producing a new subphonemic front-rounded vowel , which serves as a secondary indicator of plurality. Subsequent loss of final , however, made a
phoneme and the primary indicator of plurality, leading to a distinction between "mouse" and "mice". In this case, the lost sound left a trace in the presence of ; or equivalently, the distinction between singular and plural, formerly expressed through a suffix , has been re-expressed using a different feature, namely the front–back distinction of the main vowel. This distinction survives in the modern forms "mouse" and "mice" , although the specifics have been modified by the
Great Vowel Shift. ;Outside Germanic Similar phenomena have been described in languages outside Germanic. • Seventeen
Austronesian languages of northern Vanuatu have gone through a process whereby former *CVCV
disyllables lost their final vowel, yet preserved their contrast through the creation of new vowels: e.g.
Proto-Oceanic *paR
i "stingray" and *paR
u "hibiscus" transphonologised to and in
Mwesen. This resulted in the expansion of vowel inventories in the region, from an original five-vowel system (*a *e *i *o *u) to inventories ranging from 7 to 16 vowels (depending on the language).
Nasalisation of vowels • In French, a final sound disappeared, but left its trace in the
nasalisation of the
preceding vowel, as in
vin blanc , from historical . • In many languages (
Sino-Tibetan,
Austroasiatic,
Oceanic,
Celtic...), a vowel was nasalised by the nasal consonant preceding it: this "historical transfer of nasality between consonantal onset and vowel" is a case of transphonologization.
Compensatory lengthening • In
American English, the words
rider and
writer are pronounced with a instead of and as a result of
flapping. The distinction between the two words can, however, be preserved by (or transferred to) the length of the vowel (or in this case, diphthong), as vowels are pronounced longer before voiced consonants than before voiceless consonants. Also, the quality of the vowels may be affected. Before disappearing, a sound may trigger or prevent some phonetic change in its vicinity that would not otherwise have occurred, and which may remain long afterward. For example: • In the
English word
night, the sound (spelled
gh) disappeared, but before, or perhaps as it did so (see "
compensatory lengthening"), it lengthened the vowel , so that the word is pronounced "nite" rather than the "nit" that would otherwise be expected for a
closed syllable. • in
Hejazi Arabic's direct object pronoun, the ـُه sound at the end of words has disappeared, so that the contrast in the Classical Arabic (they said it) and (they said) became a contrast only between the vowels as (they said it) and (they said).
Tone languages • The existence of
contrastive tone in modern languages often originates in transphonologization of earlier contrasts between consonants: e.g. a former contrast of consonant voicing (* vs. *) transphonologizes to a tonal contrast (* vs. *) • The
tone split of
Chinese, where the
voiced consonants present in
Middle Chinese lowered the
tone of a syllable and subsequently lost their voicing in many varieties. •
Floating tones are generally the remains of entire disappeared syllables. ==Resulting in a new contrast on consonants==