Nasalization in Lhasa Tibetan

• Main Author: Hogan, Lee C.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: 2024
• Subjects: Arts and Humanities
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/179303
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

One of the basic tenets of the Neogrammarians was the Regularity Principle: All sound changes, as mechanical processes, take place according to laws that admit no exceptions (ausnahmslose Lautgesetze) within the same dialect, and the same sound will in the same environment always develop in the same way.... !Robins 1979:182f 1). If sound change is regular, then there might be a distinction between the innovation, the implementation of the innovation, and the spread of the sound change in the soclo-linguistic dialect in a spatio-temporal sense. Conceivably, the implementation, as well as the spread, could be abrupt or gradual. Yet if gradual, the implementation could be strictly phonetic with class features becoming more inclusive or the spread could be lexically mediated to apply to specific subsets of the lexicon, such as more common words first or culturally-or semantically-determined words, at specific times.