From: "Christophe Grandsire" <christophe.grandsire@...>
> On the same example, if the
> language doesn't have any postalveolar fricative ([S]), maybe [t_j] will
turn
> anyway into [c], despite the confusion resulting, because if it evolved
into
> the affricate [t_S], it would create a solitary postalveolar affricate
without
> a corresponding fricative, and as far as I know it's probably very rare
> (languages don't seem to like to have orphans in their sound inventories.
But
> then again, that's just a tendency, like any language "universal").
Only language that I can think of that does have an "orphan" like that is
Spanish, which has /tS/ but not /dZ/, /S/ or /Z/ (but /(d)Z/ shows up as an
"emphatic" allophone of /j/ in Latin America).
Tamil has (phonemically) only /tS/ for native words, with /S/ in borrowings
from Sanskritic languages.
~Danny~