973: New Sounds (Phoneme Inventory 2/2) Aug 8, 2017

After discussing yesterday how English has lost phonemes from its phoneme inventory, one might wonder what would happen if too many sounds are lost over time. It is possible to differentiate two words' meanings from context—or in some languages, also grammatical gender—such as 'there', 'their' and 'they're', and in German 'das Tor' and 'der Tor' (neuter and masculine respectively) mean 'door' in neuter but 'fool' in masculine. Nevertheless, this would not be too easily sustained if too many sounds were lost over the years; in languages with smaller phoneme inventories, the words tend to become longer rather than becoming homophones, such as in Hawai'ian. It should be noted that there is little need for concern that there will be only a handful of sounds used in English in the future; while some sounds merge or indeed even are dropped, new ones develop. In Old English the consonant sound /ð/ as in 'the' was not always present; it only emerged as a variant of /θ/ as in 'tooTH' when appearing between certain vowels. It can be hard to determine the evolution of sounds as it happens, but as time goes on, people start using these slight variations in different ways. This is one way how languages develop, and it happens in all languages.