The regularity of sound change

Assembled from 12 blocks · 2 evidence · 14 related

1. Story
2. The empirical finding on which every family tree ultimately rests: when a sound changes in a language, it changes in every word where it occurs in the same phonetic environment, not word by word. A speech community does not decide to alter one word; an articulation drifts, and the drift applies wherever that articulation appears. The consequence is what makes the comparative method work. Relatives do not resemble each other in scattered vocabulary — they differ from each other by rules, and the rules generate predictions in words nobody has yet looked at. The doctrine was stated at its sharpest by the Leipzig Neogrammarians in 1878, in the formula that sound laws admit no exception, and even linguists who reject the doctrine in its absolute form work as though it were true, because apparent exceptions have so consistently turned out to be conditioned by something not yet noticed — a following consonant, a syllable position, or in Verner's case the position of an accent that the language had since lost. Regularity is a claim about mechanism, not merely a convenience: it is why a demonstration of relatedness can fail, and therefore why it can succeed.
3. Knowledge
4. The regularity of sound change
5. Connections
6. The comparative method
7. Grimm's Law — the first Germanic sound shift
8. Grimm formulates the first sound shift as a system
9. The Neogrammarian doctrine: sound laws admit no exception
10. Evidence
11. Supports the attribution of the exceptionless-sound-law doctrine to the Neogrammarian programme stated in this preface. V55 verification basis: this session had no access to any source — WebFetch was egress-blocked for every host attempted and the WebSearch budget was exhausted before authoring — so the cited work was not retrieved, and no page, volume or figure quoted from it was re-checked. The doctrine is paraphrased in English; no German sentence is quoted and no translation is reproduced, because the text was not consulted.
12. Supports the general account in this pack of the comparative method, the regularity principle, contact and borrowing, glottochronology and its critics, and the definition of a language isolate. V55 verification basis: this session had no access to any source — WebFetch was egress-blocked for every host attempted and the WebSearch budget was exhausted before authoring — so the cited work was not retrieved, and no page, volume or figure quoted from it was re-checked. No chapter or page is cited, because the book was not opened in this session; the citation identifies the work a curator should check the general account against. This is the source named in the Journey declaration.