To make pronunciation easier / it sounds better that way

[pne]

I’m always amused when I read about the morphophonology of a language and come across a note describing the purpose of a morphophonological alternation as “to make pronunciation easier”.

It always seems like a cop-out to me: the native speaker has no idea why the alternation is there, but can’t imagine it being any other way, and so imagines that the pronunciation must be easier that way.

“Easier for whom?” is just the first problem with that :) Different people (influenced by their native languages) have different ideas of what’s “easy”, especially when it comes to consonant clusters.

A related amusement is when a different grammatical construction in particular cases is explained with “it sounds better that way”, which also begs the question (it only sounds better because of the Sprachgefühl of someone who’s grown up with the language; a foreign learner may well have different opinions of which grammatical construction would “sound better” in a given situation).

Comments

[elf]

(found through network)

I could understand "make pronunciation easier" changes that involve shifting to sounds that are closer to universal. Some sounds & clusters are in almost every human language, and more are common across language families; a morphological shift from a rare sound to a more common one makes sense. (I have my doubts that that's usually what happens with the "make easier" excuse, but it's possible.) Shifting to more common sounds/clusters within dialects of the same language seems more likely, though.

I could probably come up with a grammatical shift based on "sounds better," but the idea makes my head hurt.

[pne]

I could understand "make pronunciation easier" changes that involve shifting to sounds that are closer to universal. Some sounds & clusters are in almost every human language, and more are common across language families; a morphological shift from a rare sound to a more common one makes sense.

That's true.

Also, voicing or place-of-articulation assimilation is probably easier for pretty much everyone: "kt" and "gd" are both easier than "kd" or "gt" since you don't have to switch voicing half-way through the cluster, and "mb" and "nd" are both easier than "md" or "nb" since you don't have to move the tongue half-way through the cluster. Or complete assimilation: "tt" and "ss" are both likely to be easier than "ts", similarly with "kk" and "tt" versus "kt" or "tk".

The example I saw, though, had a suffix that start with /j/ after vowels, but after consonants, it started with /t/ instead "to make pronunciation easier": that seems less universal to me.