3 ms·
if /th/ is so unstable, why does it exist at all? because /t/ or /d/ sounds become corrupted to /th/ sounds. do you think the word brother always had a /th/ in
by permo-w 3y ago
if /th/ is so unstable, why does it exist at all? because /t/ or /d/ sounds become corrupted to /th/ sounds. do you think the word brother always had a /th/ in the middle?
much like when football referees slow down a tackle using VAR and lose the real sense of power of the challenge, when you slowly and academically look at written examples of words, you lose the sense of how the words are actually used in practice. conjunctive words like mid and with are almost exclusively said at high speed with almost all emphasis on the vowel and in practice sound almost exactly the same, especially when coming off the back of a consonant
- bradrn 3y ago> if /th/ is so unstable, why does it exist at all? You misunderstand me. I am saying that random, irregular change is unlikely to create the sound /th/ (or /θ/ in phonetic notation, which I’ll use from now on). As you correctly note, by itself that means very little, but it does reinforce all the other evidence I and others have mentioned. (The sound in the word ‘brother’ was formed via a different process: it is the product of regular sound change, specifically Grimm’s Law [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimm's_law] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimm's_law]. This converted all voiceless stop sounds to fricatives: if /p/→/f/ and /k/→/x/, it makes sense that /t/→/θ/ too, because that follows the same pattern.)