Re: Sound Change Susceptibility

On Wed, Nov 05, 2003 at 12:57:23PM -0500, Isidora Zamora wrote:
[snip]
> I have *no* actual data to back this up, but I am going to venture a guess
> that certain sounds are going to be more prone to change, because certain
> sounds are inherently more difficult to produce.  The interdental
> fricatives are objectively more difficult to pronounce than the alveolar
> fricatives.  And that is something that I know know for a fact.  I learned
> it from my phonology professor who had specifically studied this phenomenon
> and found a correlation between the age at which children learn to
> correctly pronounce these marked phonemes and the frequency with which the
> same phonemes were found in the world's languages.
Interesting.

> In addition to frequency, there is also a hierarchy: /s/ will be learned
> before /f/, which will be learned before /T/, if I am remembering
> correctly - that was over ten years ago, after all.  /m/ is one of the
> first sounds that a baby can pronounce (thus accounting for the
> frequency of [ma] as a component in the word for 'mother' in a lot of
> unrelated languages.
Do you know where I would find more info about this hierarchy? It sounds
fascinating. (No pun intended.)

> I would imagine that the sounds that are objectively more difficult to
> pronounce would tend to be more prone to change to something easier to
> pronounce, but there are plenty of examples of the opposite happening, so I
> could be completely wrong.
[snip]

Well, this was/is at least the guideline I followed when I derived Tamahi
from Ebisedian. One particularly difficult initial syllable, [Hy], has
completely mutated: [Hy] -> [Gwi] -> [gi]. Similarly, glottal stops
between vowels were dropped, producing diphthongs and glides. The
fricatives [Z] and [S] merged with [z] and [s], and the affricates [dZ]
and [tS] moved forward to become [dz] and [ts].

On the flip side, though, the dropping out of unstressed [@\] caused the
development of new and exciting sounds, e.g.
        [l@\"r`i] -> [lr`="i]
        [l@\r`@\"si] -> [lr`="si]
        [t@\m@\] -> [tm=]
        [t@\l@\] -> [tK=]

Similarly, the mutation of initial [h] into [x] and the subsequent loss of
[x] produces the interesting derivation [h] -> [k_h].

(Now, the other question at hand is how I would transcribe Tamahi--should
I devise a totally new romanization to capture its new sounds, or should I
be an impractical pedant and write the Ebisedian transcription which would
be pronounced in a totally different way? So far, I'm using a modified
subset of Ebisedian transcription, but it totally falls apart when it
comes to sounds like [l=], [m=], [r=], and [K=].)


T

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