--- In conlang@y..., Eric Christopherson <rakko@C...> wrote:
>
> Justin told me not long ago that a professor of his said that /noup/
> probably came from */nou?/; I'm not sure if I should think the /p/ in
<yep>
> is analogical to <nope>, or if -/p/ is just a common outcome for /?/
(I've
> been under the assumption that the roundedness of the /o/ helped make
it /p/
> instead of e.g. /k/ or /t/).
>
> This is something I've rarely if ever read about though when reading
on
> sound changes; that is to say, a glottal stop becoming another stop.
Does it
> ever happen in "normal" circumstances (by which I mean that
<yep>/<yup> and
> <nope> are kind of slangy interjections, so maybe they don't follow
all the
> rules other kinds of words do)?
Yep, and nope are definitely special cases. I've also seen "Ut oh!"
somewhere, I think.
As has already been pointed out, ? can assimilate to a n adjacent
consonant without much trouble.
Note also the spurious [k]s in Medieval Latin, where words like
<nihl> and <mihi> ended up as <nichil> and <michei>. Since intervocalic
<h> may well have represented [?] in Classical times, this could be a
case of /?/ > [k[... but in fact it's just as likely this was an attempt
at pronouncing [h]. This case is also special because it involved
non-native speakers trying to pronounce a dead language.
This of course leads up to the soundchange *? > [k] /_V in my
conlang Lumandean. Eric I believe called it "shear madness." It is
indeed problematic. I don't know what I was thinking! In any case, I am
loathe to change stuff that's already down in the official file, so I'll
need to come up with an explanation of that.
I'm thinking that perhaps originally *? assimilated to any preceding
stop and since *? is a pretty rare phoneme, and by far he most common
occurence of it is in a morphological suffix, eventually *? > C
generalized to *? > k... maybe that would work?
-JDM
>
> --
> Eric Christopherson, a.k.a. Contrarian Conlanger Rakko ^_^