Re: Plausible Sound-shifts

On Sat, 10 Mar 2007 17:12:47 +0200, John Vertical <johnvertical@...>
wrote:

>>I need to know if its plausible to have had sound shifts that would
>>yeild the following kinds of words:
>>
>>Initial fricatives (v'ed or v'less), but no initial affricates (other than
>>the s-clusters).
>>However, word-final, if there is nothing between the vowel and the
>>consonant
>>(no syllabant) then you may also have a fricative, but not an affricate. If
>>there is a syllabant between the vowel and the consonant, then the
>>fricative
>>must affricate: f > pf, and so on.
>>
>>So you can have:
>>
>>fet, but not pfet.
>>tef, but not tepf
>>tenpf, but not tenf
>>terpf, but not terf
>>teypf, but not teyf
>
>Fric > affric before nasals or /r/ makes plenty of sense, but IMO the same
>before /j/ seems a bit surprizing.
Yeah, agreed.  Does this state of affairs have the purpose of removing
ambiguity as well?

>>I've decided to not allow double syllabants surrounding a vowel, so you
>>can't have an initial AND final syllabant, and you cannot have a vowel by
>>itself without a syllabant, so your only options are *we*, *le*, *en*,
>>*er*,
>>and *ey*.
>
>I like basic idea, but what raises my eyebrow is how your the approximants
>are split into the seemingly arbitrary groups /w l/ and /j r/. On first
>thought, /l/ actually being a velarized [5] could be a possible
>explanation... but AIUI velarization is more likely for *coda* liquids? (CF
>English.)
I don't think sound change alone is the way to go here.  Instead I'd posit
analogy.
Basically, suppose some earlier state of the language had the same
zero-grade ~ e-grade alternation without this restriction, so /er ew .../
and /re we .../ were all free to occur.  Then speakers began to view the
zero-grade as basic somehow, and so started to regularize the e-grade to be
regularly derivable from it: so for instance the /er/ roots may have
outnumbered the /re/ roots, causing the smaller /re/ class to be reshaped in
favor of /er/, but the opposite happened in the case of /we/ and /ew/.  This
way you can trace any resulting split you like back to the vagaries of
frequency of root shapes in an earlier stage of the language.

Alex