If you're still looking for information, you could pay www.zompist.com as visit. It has the "Language Construction Kit", a very good introduction to conlanging and has some things to say about linguistic change as well.
If you like something a bit more exhaustive (well, a lot more, to be honest. You need at least a working knowledge of phonological features), I'd recommend H.H. Hock's "Principles of historical linguistics". It's dry material, unless you're a total geek like me
Also: I found a torrent with a ton of books on linguistics a while back, some of which are relevant to your question. They're on my old laptop however, and can't look it up for you at the moment (can't seen to find the torrent on the internet, for some reason). But I'll take a look if you're interested.
As for pure sound change, it isn't always a matter of sounds becoming easier to pronounce. If that were the case, every word in our lexicon would be reduced to something like baby-talk. There's always a tension between ease of pronunciation and perception/distinctive quality. In fact, some sounds may change back into the sound they used to be (example: dutch <ei> /ɛi/ comes from older /ai/, but in some regions/social groups in the Netherlands, people are starting to pronounce it as /ai/ once more. And this isn't a case of a chain reaction of vowel shifts like Lukc mentioned. Also, many sound changes are triggered by contact with other languages. A historic example of that would be the sound changes that resulted in Middle Welsh after the Roman legions had left Britain to its own devices. Basically, the Romanised Celts, who had grown up speaking some kind of Latin, now started speaking Celtic, because Latin was no longer as prestigious as it used to be. But they did so with a decidedly Latin accent. This caused the sounds of OW to change quite a lot.
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Originally Posted by Blaidd Drwg
