anteallach wrote: ↑Tue Jun 11, 2019 2:05 am
vegfarandi wrote: ↑Mon Jun 10, 2019 12:23 pm
A famous instance is the reversal of
flámæli in Icelandic, which involved the merger of /ɪ/ + /ɛ/ to /e/ and /ʏ/ + /œ/ to /ø/. This was nearly completely wiped out by the middle of the 20th century using the iron fist of centralized education curricula.
What was its social/regional distribution?
It was most prominent in South and East Iceland, and 42% of children in Reykjavík (South West) had it in 1929. By 1960 no children had it in Reykjavík.
The newest sound change with roughly the same distribution and probably same statistics in Reykjavík currently is called
höggmæli which turns <b d g> /p t k/ into a glottal stop before a nasal so
höfn /hœpn/ [hœʔn] 'harbor',
horn /hɔtn/ [hɔʔn] 'corner, horn', and
gögn /kœkn/ [gœʔn] 'data'. But unlike the 1940s-60s, there's no effort to eliminate this change. Maybe there's less agitation behind it as it is mostly just a phonetic thing as opposed to fundamentally altering the phonemic system which
flámæli did.
But flámæli balanced the vowel system to one where there were two phones per level of openness across front, front-rounded and back as opposed to the current system which has three levels for front and front-rounded and only two for back. Phonemically, there's an imbalance built into the system and I think there'll always be some general tendency for the language community to level that out.
