Re: Revising my consonant inventory

On Aug 15, 2007, at 12:14 AM, 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]
>
> Cool. I wonder if it's also had a change of /t/ > /k/ -- that's
> supposed to be common when /k/ is lost.
>
> I haven't found much about it online, but incidentally, this paper
> ( http://www.nytud.hu/cescl/proceedings/Daniel_Huber_CESCL.pdf )
> mentions it (or at least the Kunming variety of it) has a change of
> retroflex to dental, which is a change I wondered about the
> existence of.
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.