Change in Form
This common type of sound change involves the spread of phonetic features from one segment to another.
This hypothetical model represents the common ancestor of a set of related languages.
What is a proto-language?
These entities reflect continuous development from the same unique original form. (NOT: reflexes)
What are cognates?
A language variety undergoes this process to become the accepted and normal variety of the language to be used in literature, trade, education, and/or communication between distant communities.
What is standardization?
This sort of language is well studied but as of yet has not been proven to be related to any other language.
What is a language isolate?
This sort of change makes an etymon "sound more like" the entity it refers to. As such, although usually sporadic and not regular, they are expected to occur cross-linguistically.
What is onomatopoeia? (Acceptable also: sound symbolism)
_______ are a prerequisite for positing a subgroup of languages in a family with an intermediate common ancestor.
What are common innovations?
This principle of reconstruction favors solutions that require the fewest independent sound changes to have occurred?
What is the principle of economy? (half credit: majority wins)
Influence from a _____ may frequently involve phonotactics and scattered words like "badger" and "breadcrumb", but not frequently used vocabulary.
What is a substrate?
This sort of sound change has the potential to reduce the number of phonemes in a language.
What is a merger?
This common type of sound change tends to occur in word-medial, unstressed, and otherwise "weak" positions.
What is lenition?
Pairs of languages like these often share various characteristics, such as distinguishing verbs and nouns, articulating consonants at the velum and at the lips but not the spleen, and having similar sounding words for concepts such as "kangaroo", "WiFi", and "meow", while lacking clearly systematic contextual correspondences among sounds.
What are unrelated languages?
This model of relations within a language family predicts that varieties at its geographic center will undergo more frequent innovations than those at the peripheries.
This result of contact is the most likely to occur without a large number of bilinguals, and can be used to trace the spread of concepts across cultures.
What is "need" borrowing?
This type of sound change, which changes the number of phonemes in a language, cannot be unconditioned, under the assumption of regularity.
What is a split?
This type of sound change involves multiple segments in a sequence combining into one segment, usually with features drawn from each of them.
This group of typically neighboring languages feature widespread and non-trivial structural similarities that have demonstrably increased over time.
What is a sprachbund? (Accept also language area)
DAILY DOUBLE: *Sound changes* favored by this typologically-motivated principle of reconstruction, in isolation, are less convincing evidence of subgrouping (than rules based on other principles).
What is the principle of directionality?
This process of transition typically involves a development from monolingualism to bilingualism, and then to monolingualism, favoring a socioeconomically advantaged language.
What is language shift?
Aside from cognacy, contact, and similarities favored by language universal factors, this phenomenon can account for a significant amount of resemblances between words with the same meaning, especially shorter words.
What is (random) chance (resemblance)?
DAILY DOUBLE: Sound change and other diachronic factors may cause this non-semantically, non-syntactically motivated pattern of alternation among inflectional forms of a word. This highly idiosyncratic sort of innovation may spread in a language via analogy.
What are morphomes?
What phenomenon can produce systematic sound correspondences between two related languages that are results of sound changes only after a specific point in relative chronology that was long *after* their ancestors diverged into separate languages?
What is loaning/borrowing/contact?
The principle of shared features?
What is hypercorrection. (accept also: refection)
This process, whereby a foreign phoneme is replaced with the "closest" native phoneme, is more likely to affect loans from languages that are less familiar to speakers of the recipient language.