A well-known example is the p → f sound change in the Germanic languages where an older Indo-European p sound was replaced by an f sound, such as in pater → father; or pes, pedis → foot.
These similarities mean that we can—and should—think of language as a system for the transmission of information that is tantamount to ‘aural DNA’. Even the peculiar phenomenon of concerted evolution in genetics—where a nucleotide replacement at a specific site in one gene is quickly followed by the same nucleotide replacement at the same site in other, typically related, genes—is also observed in language. Known as regular sound change, a specific phone or sound changes over a relatively short period of time to the same other phone in many words in the lexicon [ 27, 28]. A well-known example is the p → f sound change in the Germanic languages where an older Indo-European p sound was replaced by an f sound, such as in pater → father; or pes, pedis → foot.