Chapter Outline

Introduction

So far in this book, we searched for crosslinguistically recurrent patterns in synchronic structure. However, languages keep evolving. Take, for instance, the phonemic inventory of today’s English. It has gaps: it does not contain certain sounds that other languages have. An example comes from fricatives: English has labiodentals (as the /θ/ in thick), alveolars (as the /s/ in seal), and palatals (as /ʃ/ in sheen) but velar fricatives (as /χ/ in the German word lachen ‘laugh’) do not occur. This was not always the case: Old English did have velar fricatives; their traces are preserved in the silent gh -s of the spelling of night or light . This shows that there has been a process of phonological loss spanning the centuries as Old English gradually morphed into the modern variety.