Written by Fae Hicks (Edinburgh)

In the depths of Scottish winter, 1st – 2nd December, we welcomed over 50 Historical Phonologists to Edinburgh for the 7th Edinburgh Symposium in Historical Phonology (ESHP). ESHP is a biannual event that brings together researchers from across the world for a “Historical Phonology party”. As it is a small subfield, events like ESHP are vital to promote and maintain a sense of community within Historical Phonology and we are very grateful to the Philological Society for supporting this event. Thanks to funding from PhilSoc we were able to keep conference fees low and offer a reduced rate to student attendees.

ESHP carves out space to consider the big issues, those overarching questions which guide research in Historical Phonology but are too complex to capture in a twenty-minute talk, like what is a possible phonological change? How can the results of historical phonology inform phonological theorising? And to what extent is phonological change independent of changes that occur at other levels of the grammar? Over two hours (on different days!) our plenary speaker, David Natvig, dove into these latter questions in his talk “Phonology Down and Phonology Up: Historical Phonology at the Interface with Phonetics and Morphology” which explored the key questions of when phonology actually changes and how we can know that it has changed, in part focusing on case studies of vowel shift and velar palatalisation from the history of Norwegian. 

As always, talks at ESHP covered a wide range of topics and methods of investigation from the reconstruction of Hittite stress to experimental phonetic approaches to accounting for sound change. Split across both days, the poster sessions are central to ESHP’s calendar. The poster sessions in particular promote active discussion between attendees at all career stages. We are grateful to the ESHP community for making this not only an intellectually stimulating and entertaining event, but also a familiar and welcoming one. Of course, we are particularly thankful to PhilSoc for enabling us to keep ESHP an accessible event.