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P a g e
A
The changes that have caused the most disagreement are those in pronunciation. We
have various sources of evidence for the pronunciations
of earlier times, such as the
spellings, the treatment of words borrowed from other languages or borrowed by them,
the descriptions of contemporary grammarians and spelling-reformers, and the modern
pronunciations in all the languages and dialects concerned From the middle of the
sixteenth century, there are in England writers who attempt to describe the position of the
speech-organs for the production of English phonemes, and who invent what are in effect
systems of phonetic symbols. These
various kinds of evidence, combined with a
knowledge of the mechanisms of speech-production, can often give us a very good idea
of the pronunciation of an earlier age, though absolute certainty is never possible.
B
When we study the pronunciation of a language over any period of a few generations
or more, we find there are always large-scale regularities in the changes: for example,
over a certain period of time, just about all the long [a:] vowels in a language may change
into long [e:] vowels, or all the [b] consonants in a certain position (for example at the end
of a word) may change into [p] consonants. Such regular changes are often called sound
laws. There are no universal sound laws (even though sound laws often reflect universal
tendencies), but simply particular sound laws for one given language (or dialect) at one
given period
C
It is also possible that fashion plays a part in the process of change. It certainly plays a
part in the spread of change:
one person imitates another, and people with the most
prestige are most likely to be imitated, so that a change that takes place in
one social
group may be imitated (more or less accurately) by speakers in another group. When a
social group goes up or down in the world, its pronunciation of Russian, which had
formerly
been considered desirable, became on the contrary an undesirable kind of
accent to have, so that people tried to disguise it. Some of the changes in accepted
English pronunciation in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have been shown to
consist in the replacement of one style of pronunciation by another style already existing,
and it is likely that such substitutions were a result of the
great social changes of the
period: the increased power and wealth of the middle classes, and their steady infiltration