Re: Sound changes

John Cowan wrote:
>
>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.)
>
The Cantonese name _Ng_? Please tell that there's a vowel missing here
somewhere - a word  [N=] ought to be illegal!

                                       Andreas

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