Relative Frequency as a Determinant of Phonetic Change

George Kingsley ZipfMiss or Mrs., and it therefore needs no powerful accent of its own.But there are hundreds of possibilities for confusion of the proper name.Hence, if one part should be made more conspicuous by accent, it must logically be this, the proper name.We may say that, as soon as master became a frequently used title of address, it was so normal in discourse that it lost its strong accent, so as to cause a weakening in form.But I should point out here, by way of preface to many examples, that the weaker form is invariably the more frequent form.For example, let us simply take the special case of mister and master.According to Godfrey Dewey's I analysis of ioo,ooo modern English words, mister occurs 148 times, master but 13.In other words the weaker form is more than eleven times more frequent than the stronger.Indeed, in hundreds of cases similar to that of master beside mister, one finds that some weakening of form is ever concomitant with a decided increase in frequency of use.Moreover, a word both "phonetically" and "acoustically" unfamiliar (that is, from both the speaker's and the hearer's point of view) is seldom if ever abbreviated.On the contrary, it is always distinctly pronounced and often overemphasized.Should one say "gater," few New Englanders would at once think of an alligator; but in the land of alligators such a verbal foreshortening would undoubtedly be at once understood.Indeed, this principle has always been recognized as fundamental in the origin of dialects: different environments produce different cultures, which in turn bring about a different use of words.The foregoing theory of the inter-dependence of form and frequency of usage I shall now try to demonstrate a posteriori with the thesis: Principle of Frequency.The accent, or degree of conspicuousness, of any word, syllable, or sound, is inversely proportionate to the relative frequency of that word, syllable, or sound, among its fellow words, syllables, or sounds, in the stream of spoken language.As usage becomes more frequent, form becomes less accented, or more easily pronounceable, and vice versa.