Re: Jameld (was: Re: Germanic YANC alert!)

James Campbell wrote:
> Conhistorically, _t~s_ developed from OJ _ts'_ (that's s-acute), which in
> some way represented a /S/-like sound
Why not originally /tS/?  Say, s' was once used for /S/, thus ts' was
/tS/, but the two sounds merged, and for whatever reason, s' was
dropped; or perhaps s' became another sound, perhaps /x/, and then was
lost, after that, /tS/ simplified to /S/.

> [* Not being a qualified linguist, I don't know if this would really work -
> are very small populations more or less linguistically conservative?]
They generally tend to be more conservative, but many other factors come
into play.  For instance, if the Jameld-speakers interacted with
speakers of other languages, those languages could heavily influence
their language.

> but some verbs retain the final -e for reasons of euphony, as
> in vegne.
Any rules to predict when -e is kept?  Perhaps if the stem ends in a
stop followed by another sound (as in vegn-)?

>  Past (perfect)      -mä    I sneezed: Me nësmä
In verbs like _vegnen_, is the -e retained?  In other words, would the
past tense be _vegnemä_?  _Vegnmä_ would seem to be a hard word to
pronounce.

> Mainly as in English.
No V2 structure?

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