LING 425 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Phoneme
5 Feb 2020
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Document Summary
As its name states, phonemic loss occurs when a phoneme disappears completely between the different stages of a language. There are two types of phonemic loss partial and complete. Phonemic partial loss occurs when, only some of the phonemes are lost while others are retained, such as the loss of final consonant in fijian (i. e. conditioned sound change). Complete loss occurs when, the loss of phonemes. All cases of unconditioned around loss imply complete phonemic loss. A sound can change phonemically without phonetically through the loss of conditioning environment. An example of this is the development of the nasal phoneme [ ] in. Originally this sound was represented as an allophone of /n/ before velar sounds, such as in the word singer [sing ], even though the pronunciation was the same as it is today [si g ]. This led to the phonemic change from /n/ to / / without any changes occurring phonetically.
