Sound Change/Law/Shift

语音演变/规律/替变

Terms used in historical linguistics to describe the changes in a language’s sound system over a period of time. Many types of sound change have been recognized, e.g. whether the change affects the total number of phonemes or affects only the allophones of a phoneme. When a series of related sound changes takes place at a particular stage of a language’s history, the change is known as a sound shift. A regular series of changes is traditionally referred to in comparative philology as a sound law - one hypothesis about such ‘laws’ (the neogrammarian hypothesis) being that they had no exceptions, i.e. at a given time all words containing a sound in a given phonetic environment would change in the same way, and any which did not could be explained by reference to a further law.

历史语言学术语，用来描写一种语言的语音系统在一段时间内的演变。语音演变已分出多种类型，例如，演变是影响全部音位还是只影响一个音位的音位变体。当一系列相关联的语音演变发生在一种语言历史的某一阶段时，这种演变称作语音替变。一系列有规则的演变传统上在比较语文学中称作语音规律——有关这种“规律”的一个假说（新语法学派假说）是它们没有例外，即在一给定时间内在一特定语音环境中包含某一音的词都以同样方式演变，而任何不这样演变的音都可以用其他规律来解释。一些最初看上去是这类规律例外的情形，最终仍用基于这一假说的考察得到解释。