Today we talked about sound change, which sets the stage for stuff like stress and tone. Sound change is the cause of—and solution to—all your problems. I know there was a lot of material today, but the important takeaways are the major types of sound changes (assimilations, dissimilations, lenitions, fortitions, deletions, insertions), and the principles that underlie them. Often when creating a language you have to make up your own sound changes, whether they ever existed or not. Keep that in mind when you look at your homework tonight!

Material From Today’s Class

PDFs

• Class Slides
• The Kahtsaai Language by William Annis
• Index Diachronica

Links

• Sound Change Article on Wikipedia
• FrathWiki List of Sound Changes
• Lenition (This one’s particularly good!)
• Online Index Diachronica

Assignments

Reading

• AoLI Chapter 1, pp. 66-78
• AoLI Chapter 1, pp. 89-96

Practice

• Scour Wikipedia or other sources and find an interesting sound change, and post it to our #evolution channel. (This should help with the homework!)

Mastery

• Mastery Assignment (MA) 1: Sound Change

Backburner

• Continue examining the first stage of your final project.