Re: Sound changes

JS Bangs scripsit:

> I'm unsure, but are tones ever just "lost" that way?
Definitely.  The Qiangic group of languages, which is Tibeto-Burman,
plainly started out with four tones.  Many languages in the group
have either two or three, however, and Northern Qiang has no tones at all.
This is not exactly likely to be influence from the surrounding Chinese,
nor is it plausible that all the other langs developed tone except NQ.

> Anyway, the strangest things in my lang's history are the nasal > glide
> shift, which isn't even that weird and is attested (at least partly) in
> the real world:
>
> /m n N/ > /w r j/
Mandarin changed ancestral /N/ in initial position to /w/, which is
really weird; if any two voiced sounds have less in common, I can't
think of them.  (E.g. the Cantonese name Ng has the Mandarin equivalent
Wu.)

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