Re: Blah blah blah natlangs

Eric Christopherson wrote:
>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 ....>
Interesting question.  I'd say no, generally; although it might happen, as
the result of assimilation, say ....? # C...., or by vowel loss
....?(V)C....
Southeast Asian languages, and Malayo-Polynesian in particular, show a nice
"continuum of consonantal attrition" with respect to final consonants, where
everything over time tends to move toward loss.  /?/ is the next to last
step.  So you have e.g. Philippine langs. with a wide variety of possible
finals (vd./vl. stops, r l s, m n N-- older Javanese too; then Malay with
only vl.stops, rls mnN.  The language family I worked on in Sulawesi
apparently had shifted *-p > ? and *-m > n at an early stage; then *-t > ?,
so one group of languages had finals /? k, n N/; another continued on with
*-k > ? and *-n > N, so Bugis and Makassarese showed only final /? N/
(continuants were always a problem; but they shifted in various ways to /?/
too).  Proto-Oceanic is reconstructed with a Malay-like system, but only a
few languages preserve any final C (though remnants of them remain in some
of the verbal suffixes).





(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)?