Palatalization (sound change)

In historical linguistics, palatalization /ˌpælətəlaɪˈzeɪʃən/ is a sound change that either results in a palatal or palatalized consonant or a front vowel, or is triggered by one of these. Palatalization involves change in the place or manner of articulation of consonants, or the fronting or raising of vowels. In some cases, palatalization involves assimilation or lenition.

An example of palatalization in English is the pronunciation of did you? as [dɪdʒuː] rather than [dɪdjuː]

Types

Palatalization is either an example of assimilation or not. That is, in some cases it is triggered by a palatal or palatalized consonant or front vowel, while in other cases it is not conditioned in any way.

Consonant

Palatalization either changes place of articulation or manner of articulation of consonants. It may add palatal secondary articulation or change primary articulation from velar to palatal or alveolar, alveolar to postalveolar.

It may also cause a consonant to change its manner of articulation from stop to affricate or fricative. This change in the manner of articulation is a form of lenition. However, this lenition is frequently accompanied by a change in place of articulation.

Sound change

Sound change includes any processes of language change that affect pronunciation (phonetic change) or sound system structures (phonological change). Sound change can consist of the replacement of one speech sound (or, more generally, one phonetic feature) by another, the complete loss of the affected sound, or even the introduction of a new sound in a place where there previously was none. Sound changes can be environmentally conditioned, meaning that the change only occurs in a defined sound environment, whereas in other environments the same speech sound is not affected by the change. The term "sound change" refers to diachronic changes, or changes in a language's underlying sound system over time; "alternation", on the other hand, refers to surface changes that happen synchronically and do not change the language's underlying system (for example, the -s in the English plural can be pronounced differently depending on what sound it follows; this is a form of alternation, rather than sound change). However, since "sound change" can refer to the historical introduction of an alternation (such as post-vocalic /k/ in Tuscan, once [k], but now [h]), the label is inherently imprecise and often must be clarified as referring to phonetic change or restructuring.

Change

Change, The Change, or Changing may refer to:

The process of becoming different

Sound

In physics, sound is a vibration that propagates as a typically audible mechanical wave of pressure and displacement, through a medium such as air or water. In physiology and psychology, sound is the reception of such waves and their perception by the brain.

Acoustics

Acoustics is the interdisciplinary science that deals with the study of mechanical waves in gases, liquids, and solids including vibration, sound, ultrasound, and infrasound. A scientist who works in the field of acoustics is an acoustician, while someone working in the field of acoustical engineering may be called an acoustical engineer. An audio engineer, on the other hand is concerned with the recording, manipulation, mixing, and reproduction of sound.

Applications of acoustics are found in almost all aspects of modern society, subdisciplines include aeroacoustics, audio signal processing, architectural acoustics, bioacoustics, electro-acoustics, environmental noise, musical acoustics, noise control, psychoacoustics, speech, ultrasound, underwater acoustics, and vibration.