Mechanising Historical Phonology

The Neogrammarian approach to historical phonology involves propounding sound‐change laws and explaining exceptions by means such as sub‐laws, rearranging the relative chronology, and appeal to special factors such as analogy, borrowing, and sporadic phenomena like metathesis. Progress is mostly made manually, but in the second half of the twentieth century some linguists looked forward to the ‘triumph of the electronic Neogrammarian’. Although this has not been realized yet, there are opportunities to make important advances. This paper offers a critical survey of the field since the 1950s and suggestions for the future.