Re: Evolution of Romance (was: **Answer to Pete**)

On Fri, 1 Feb 2008 17:20:24 +0100, Benct Philip Jonsson wrote:

>The only thing I see speaking against a development g' > j > g' > dZ
>is Occam's razor! Clearly [g;] or [J\] and [j] can both develop out of
>and into each other, but to posit a to-and-fro development seems a bit
>suspicious.
But you need to set up j >> dZ anyway, so then you have a palatal >
palatovelar > palatal to-&-fro development there. And for the same, a
continuant > stop > continuant development is not only possible, but necessary!

However, it just occurs to me that starting from j > gj) rather than j > J\
directly would be symmetrical with w > gw)... or "/gj)/" could have been
phonetically a simplex [J\] since the beginning anyway...

Is there any evidence on which of the kj) tj) and gj) j mergers took place
first?

>The relative infrequency of dj compared to tj is probably
>a better and sufficient explanation why the voiceless palatals develop
>differently in Western Romance.
I'm afraid I don't quite see the logic behind this argument. It's a merger,
not a chain shift, so there can be no pull effect due to either palatalized
coronal.


>For all that I want an alveolar diacritic _a\ seems a poor choice
>unless a\ stands for some alveolar sound. I dislike _t for breathy
>voice for the same reason. To me _t for alveolar and _h\ for breathy
>voice would make much better sense. I guess I'll have to add that one
>to my list of 'BXS' modifications. Of course the only goal of BXS is
>to be inherently consistent, unlike Z-SAMPA and even less than CXS
>caring about backwards compatibility.
We all have our SAMPA idiolects, don't we? Like me with my preference to use
) not _ for an actual tie bar; tS_w_h would become thSw))) or maybe even
tWS)) ;)

John Vertical

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