Whorf's law

Whorf's law is a sound law in Uto-Aztecan linguistics proposed by the linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf. It explains the origin in the Nahuan languages of the phoneme /tɬ/ which is not found in any of the other languages of the Uto-Aztecan family. The existence of /tɬ/ in Nahuatl had puzzled previous linguists and caused Sapir to reconstruct a /tɬ/ phoneme for Proto-Uto-Aztecan based only on evidence from Aztecan. In a 1937 paper^[1] published in the journal American Anthropologist, Whorf argued that phoneme was a result of some of the Nahuan or Aztecan languages having undergone a sound change changing the original */t/ to [tɬ] in the position before */a/. This sound law has come to be known as "Whorf's law", and is still considered valid although a more detailed understanding of the precise conditions under which it took place has been developed. The situation had been obscured by the fact that oftentimes the */a/ had then subsequently been lost or changed to another vowel, making it difficult to realize what had conditioned the change. Because some Nahuan languages have /t/ where others have /tɬ/, Whorf thought that the law had been limited to certain dialects and that the dialects that had /t/ were more conservative. In 1978, Lyle Campbell and Ronald Langacker showed that in fact Whorf's law had affected all of the Nahuan languages and that some dialects had subsequently changed /tɬ/ back to /t/.^[2][3] In 1996, Alexis Manaster Ramer showed that the sound change had in fact also happened before the Proto-Uto-Aztecan high central vowel */ɨ/, and not just before */a/.^[4][5]

Notes

References