Re: A question on palatalization.

I remember having a long discussion with a lecturer at uni who insisted that
you couldn't have /tS/ unless you also had /t/ and /S/ in the same phoneme
inventory. My reply was that you didn't have to go very far to find a
language that broke this "rule". You didn't even have to leave England! Part
of the problem lies in the symbol, which can't help but suggest the idea
that this one phoneme is a coalescence of two. I much prefer the American
version of c+hacek, and j+hacek for /dZ/. As far as I know, the existence of
/tS/ has nothing to do with /S/ at all. The phonemes /S/ and /tS/ tend to
get found in the same inventory because they are similar sounds, not because
they are related in any way. Mind you, there are a lot of languages with
skewed phonologies (Omeina has turned out to have one: no /p/ /f/ or /v/ but
/b/ and /m/ - a very short labial group!)
Mike
> > 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

Reply