Re: The beautifulest phonology

On Thu, 21 Mar 2002, BP Jonsson wrote:

> At 18:03 2002-03-20 +0000, Raymond Brown wrote:
> >I'll have /p/, /t/ and /k/ (I don't much mind whether /t/ is alveolar or
> >dental, but think dental is preferable) - these would weaken to [b], [d],
> >[g] or even [B], [D], [G] medially (a bit like Tepa or Tamil :)
>
> And Old Finnish where [B D G] were conditioned allophones of /p t k/, tho
> the condition was rather more complicated -- the sounds weakened when
> initial in a closed syllable with a short vowel, which is a more
> interesting condition than mere intervocalicness IMHO, altho Sohlob has
> intervocalic weakening also.
I love consonant gradation. :)

> Or you could have /r/ as an/the allophone of /t/ in weakening contexts.  I
> for one don't care much for [D] or [G] -- noting that Finnish dialects
> mostly turned [D] into /r/ [r] and [G] into zero.
Well, not really. [D] in very many cases has become [v], eg. /katu/, road,
stem in Old Finnish /kaDu/, in modern, /kavu/. etc.

---ferko