Re: Revising my consonant inventory

On Wed, 15 Aug 2007 00:23:01 -0500, Eric Christopherson wrote:

> On Aug 13, 2007, at 10:00 AM, R A Brown wrote:
>
>> John Vertical wrote:
>> [snip]
>>>> I have one more question, is /?_h/ possible, or would that
>>>> become /h/ within
>>>> minutes?
>>>  Theoretically possible, but just as rare as an aspirated ejectiv
>>> (ie. not attested at all in the wild AFAIK.)
>>
>> According to the Chinese linguist, Yuen Ren Chao, it occurs in the
>> Yunnan dialect of Mandarin. In that dialect Mandarin /k/ (Pinyin
>> _g_) is pronounced [?], and /k_h/ (Pinyin _k_) is pronounced [?_h]
ANADEW strikes again... well, I'm not sure if "except worse" is applicable
here, but hey, it's a precedent.

>I forgot to add that there exists a [?_?\], distinguishable from /?/,
>at least in some varieties of Arabic, so that's another possibility
>for that slot. It might be a little strange for the other two stops
>to have _h but for this one to have _?\, but I think it could happen
>through a strengthening of the [?_h]. It might or might not lead to
>the other aspirated stops becoming pharyngealized.
I was going to comment that that is a realization of a voiced radical
fricativ, but the other pharyngealized sounds are reconstructed as stops for
Proto-Semitic, and cognate with ejectivs in other Afro-Asiatic branches; and
IIRC there's even a linguist who has claimed that `ayin is actually [?_?\]
in MOST Semitic langs, just frequently misdescribed. Your proposition of
fortition also makes some sense - aspiration with velar friction is
attested, so why not aspiration with pharyngeal friction, especially on a
guttural consonant?

AFMCL, I've started to dout if I need to attest separate aspirate stops for
proto-uwjge at all; they might be explainable as the development of stop +
w, with /pw/ going > /pP/ > /P/ > /f/ without needing the aspirated
intermediate at all. Maybe the same for stop + j; I get a lot of these, too,
from vowel breikidge, and then they just disappear somewhere. (Note to self:
check how current theory explains the lenition-before-back-vowels thing in
Ugric.) There is also vowel + ?\, but the pharyngeal glide turns into an
uvular trill that has mostly remained around until the modern form.

John Vertical

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