In historical linguistics, transphonologization (also known as rephonologization or cheshirization, see below) is a type of sound change whereby a phonemic contrast that used to involve a certain feature X evolves in such a way that the contrast is preserved, yet becomes associated with a different feature Y. For example, a language contrasting two words * vs. * may evolve historically so that final consonants are dropped, yet the modern language preserves the contrast through the nature of the vowel, as in a pair vs. . Such a situation would be described by saying that a former contrast between oral and nasal consonants has been transphonologized into a contrast between oral and nasal vowels. The term transphonologization was coined by André-Georges Haudricourt. The concept was defined and amply illustrated by Hagège & Haudricourt; it has been mentioned by several followers of panchronic phonology, and beyond.

Resulting in a new contrast on vowels

Umlaut

A common example of transphonologization is umlaut. In many Germanic languages around 500–700 AD, a sound change fronted a back vowel when an or followed in the next syllable. Typically, the or was then lost, leading to a situation where a trace of the original or remains in the fronted quality of the preceding vowel. Alternatively, a distinction formerly expressed through the presence or absence of an or suffix was then re-expressed as a distinction between a front or back vowel. As a specific instance of this, in prehistoric Old English, a certain class of nouns was marked by an suffix in the (nominative) plural, but had no suffix in the (nominative) singular. A word like "mouse", for example, had a plural "mice". After umlaut, the plural became pronounced, where the long back vowel was fronted, producing a new subphonemic front-rounded vowel , which serves as a secondary indicator of plurality. Subsequent loss of final, however, made a phoneme and the primary indicator of plurality, leading to a distinction between "mouse" and "mice". In this case, the lost sound left a trace in the presence of ; or equivalently, the distinction between singular and plural, formerly expressed through a suffix, has been re-expressed using a different feature, namely the front–back distinction of the main vowel. This distinction survives in the modern forms "mouse" and "mice", although the specifics have been modified by the Great Vowel Shift. Similar phenomena have been described in languages outside Germanic.

Nasalization of vowels

Compensatory lengthening

Before disappearing, a sound may trigger or prevent some phonetic change in its vicinity that would not otherwise have occurred, and which may remain long afterward. For example:

Tone languages

Resulting in a new contrast on consonants

Other examples

Other names

Rephonologization was a term used by Roman Jakobson (1931 [1972]) to refer to essentially the same process but failed to catch on because of its ambiguity. In a 1994 paper, Norman (1994) used it again in the context of a proposed Old Chinese sound change that transferred a distinction formerly expressed through putative pharyngealization of the initial consonant of a syllable to one expressed through presence or absence of a palatal glide before the main vowel of the syllable. However, rephonologization is occasionally used with another meaning, referring to changes such as the Germanic sound shift or the Slavic change from to, where the phonological relationships among sounds change but the number of phonemes stays the same. That can be viewed as a special case of the broader process being described here. James Matisoff (1991:443) coined cheshirization as a synonym for transphonologization. The term jokingly refers to the Cheshire Cat, a character in the book Alice in Wonderland, who "vanished quite slowly, beginning with the end of the tail, and ending with the grin, which remained some time after the rest of it had gone". Cheshirization has been used by some other authors (e.g. John McWhorter in McWhorter 2005, and Hilary Chappell in Chappell 2006).