Therapeutic changes

Therapeutic changes restore patterns which have been damaged by previous changes. A number of examples of this are provided by the use of analogy, the ability to reason from parallel cases, which is a fundamental feature of human language. It is most obvious in the case of child language, when children create past tenses such as taked, drinked, after hearing forms such as baked, blinked.

In language change, analogy tends to restore similar forms to items which have become separated by sound changes. For example, changes in the vowel system resulted in the separation of the adjec­tive old from its comparative form elder. So a new comparative form older has been formed by analogy with forms such as young, younger, where the first part of both words is the same. The form elder has now been relegated to a few specialized uses and phrases, such as elders of the church, his elder brother.

However, it is a mistake to regard analogy purely as a restorer of broken patterns. This is an oversimplification, because analogy is not only found in a therapeutic role: it can itself disrupt sound changes. For example, we would expect [d] in the middle of the word father (as in (\o\\\\c fadar). But father was influenced by the word brother, and the expected [dl appears as [d]. In addition, there are a number of dif­ferent types of analogy. In some ways, it is a 'rag-bag' category used to

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explain a variety of changes. So it is misleading to make vague general claims about analogy, unless the statement can be narrowed down.

Changes which trigger one another off

Chain shifts - that is, changes which seem to occur in linked sequences - are a particularly interesting therapeutic phenomenon. For example, in Chaucer's time the word lyf 'life' was pronounced [li:f] (like today's leaf). The vowel [i:] changed to [ei] (and later to [ai]). But this was not an isolated change. At around this time, all the other long vowels shifted: [e:] became [i:] [e:] became [e:].and [a:] became [e: ]. It looks as if each vowel rushed to fill the empty space left by the one ahead of it (Figure 53).

Yet the situation is not necessarily as straightforward as the exam­ple given here - which is itself disputed. Quite often, several sounds move simultaneously, making it difficult to say whether one sound is being dragged into an empty space, or whether it is being pushed out of its rightful place. In Figure 54, is [e:] being dragged into the space left by [i:]? Or is it being pushed by [e:]?

Controversy surrounds the actual mechanism by which sounds affect one another. The only certain fact is that changes seem to-occur in linked sequences, and in so doing preserve the basic patterning of human language.

Recently, linguists have suggested that chain shifts occur not only in the sounds of a language, but in the syntax also, For example, some languages have relative clauses (clauses introduced by which, that) placed before the nouns attached to them. They say, as it were,

Which is sour wine

where English says 'Wine which is sour'. Such languages also tend to have objects which precede their verbs. A literal translation of English 'Harry dislikes wine which is sour' might be

Harry [which is sour wine] dislikes.

If, however, a change occurs so that relative clauses move to a posi­tion after their nouns, then the verb and object are likely to change places also. Once again, most people would agree that the changes are linked in some way, though the precise mechanism is disputed.