Ask and you shall receive: kind of. " The application of a Grimm's-like law comes later and differently in different languages, e.g. where the -p -t -k endings became -ʔ in Wu and -ø in Mandarin, or the /g/ initial was palatalised in certain situations so what in Korean is /ga/ is likely /tɕiɑ/ in Mandarin."
Don't ask me what those sounds are, but people seem to have noticed sound shifts in the languages in question. "But there's no single rule to explain all of them. They each developed in different ways."
It is fascinating what sorts of answers to random questions are easily available to us these days. Of course the answer has nothing to do with my life, and too much 'satiable curtiosity can get your nose pulled...
4 comments:
John McWhorter considers Grimm's Law to be evidence of Indo-European/Germanic encountering a Semitic trade language in the north, probably something related to Phoenician.
It's hard to imagine why pronunciation should change otherwise--if a different sound were more congenial to the human palate, why wouldn't it used that in the first place?
There are also associations with words that move us off a pronunciation. Horned toad was even called a "horny toad" a couple of generations ago, but no one would make that mistake now, as "horny" has a whole different meaning. We forget that in all languages there are accidents like this that cause people to shy away from one word and onto another. We have no chance of seeing it a thousand years later, but it was there. Asimov's psychohistory and Seldon plan is a brilliant idea but the reverse of reality. the randomness and oddity of chaos theory is much more likely, not only in history, but in language.
I can imagine a suffix being seen as babyish or otherwise inappropriate thanks to association with a word shift or with a particular person's speech.
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