OT: /r/ - /l/ - /n/ [was Re: OT: Rant about degres Celsius]

Quoting Anton Sherwood <bronto@...>:

> > John Cowan eskrë: »
> > > What's really weird are the Latinized abbreviations
> > > for the English counties:  Salop for Shropshire, e.g.
>
> James Campbell wrote:
> > Oh, sure, pick the weirdest one from the box <g>. Actually, "Salop"
> > has allus puzzled me, mainly because it just looks so... daft.
>
> The Normans broke up the cluster and (as in various other names,
> notably *cester) changed /S/ to /s/; but how /r/ became /l/ is
> beyond me.
A change of [r] to [l], or [l] to [r], is very frequent
typologically.  The two sounds can sound very similar
acoustically if the /r/ is a tap or trill, and the /l/
is alveolar rather than velar, both of which were likely
the case in Norman French.  In Georgian, for example,
the suffix /-ul/, which is used quite like English "-ish",
undergoes regular dissimilation by shifting /l/ to /r/
if there is a preceding /l/ in the word:

  inglisur    "English"
  pranguli    "French"
  italiuri    "Italian"
  osetuli     "Ossetian"

A similar dissimilation occurs with the Phaleran ordinal morpheme,
/-l/:

  /l/ -> [r] if a consonant in the immediately preceding
         syllable is [l];
         [ra] if the syllable to which it is attached already
         has two morae;
         [dra] if the preceding syllable ends in a nasal;
         [l] in any other circumstance.

  1      esa        esal
  2      nû         nul
  3      meo        myul
  4      teo        tyul
  5      plenai     plenaira
  6      sorkwa     sorkwal
  7      phwali     phwalir

It is also typologically common for /n/ to undergo the same
process as /l/.  The ancient city of _Panormus_, in Sicily,
is today's _Palermo_.  In Phaleran, the ergative case ending
/llu/ has an allomorph [dru] after nasals:

   Phrâstyumen + llu 'Council of 20 + ERG' >
   Phrâstyumen + ru >
   Phrâstyumen + (d) + ru

where the [d] surfaces epenthetically to break apart an otherwise
impossible cluster (even across syllables!).

=====================================================================
Thomas Wier <trwier@...> <http://home.uchicago.edu/~trwier>

             "...koruphàs hetéras hetére:isi prosápto:n /
Dept. of Linguistics  mú:tho:n mè: teléein atrapòn mían..."
University of Chicago "To join together diverse peaks of thought /
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