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Re: Sound changes

From:JS Bangs <jaspax@...>
Date:Thursday, August 22, 2002, 23:03
Herman Miller sikyal:

> I suppose this is as good a time as any to mention some of the sound > changes in Hinate~, the Zireen language I've started working on. > > Bilabial and labiodental sounds in Simape~ (the ancestor language) end up > as dental sounds in Hinate~. > > /p/ > /t_d/ > /p_h/ > /t_d_h/ > /f/ > /T/ > /v/ > /D/ > /m/ > /n_d/
Eh? This is very, very, very odd, to the point that I would reject it as unnatural. Consonants do not randomly change places of articulation (and such a thing is prohibited under modern phonological theories), and you reverse several well-attested phonological processes. /T/ > /f/ and /D/ > /v/ are both plausible, but their reverses are essentially unknown.
> As a consequence, some of the alveolar sounds moved back to the retroflex > position. > > /t/ > /t`/ > /t_h/ > /t`_h/ > /z/ > /r\`/
This is acceptable, since the sounds were pushed, but it's still odd in conjunction with the other changes.
> Other changes include the spread of nasalization and loss of the low tone: > > /su_Hnda_M/ > /hu~_Hn`a_M/ "night" > /ja_LzaR\_M/ > /ja_Mr\`a_HG/ "river"
I'm unsure, but are tones ever just "lost" that way? 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/ And the later shift of /*lj/, which gives [Z] in Praci, [j\] (voiced palatal fricative) in Yivrian, and [K\] (voiced alveolar lateral fricative) in Tzingrizhil. Jesse S. Bangs jaspax@u.washington.edu http://students.washington.edu/jaspax/ "If you look at a thing nine hundred and ninety-nine times, you are perfectly safe; if you look at it the thousandth time, you are in frightful danger of seeing it for the first time." --G.K. Chesterton

Replies

Herman Miller <hmiller@...>
Jan van Steenbergen <ijzeren_jan@...>
Thomas R. Wier <trwier@...>
John Cowan <jcowan@...>