Re: Sound changes

From: "michael poxon" <m.poxon@...>
> I think there have to be some limitations; you can't, in all, honesty, have
> a sequence like /tu/ becoming /x/ or something like that, whereas /tu/ could
> conceivably become /dv/ or a host of other possibilities.
Of course, technically anything can happen (it was posted earlier how /ni/
becomes /a/ in Chinese).

However changes are more likely to be systematic:  if /tue/ becomes /dve/ you
expect /tie/ to /dZe/, or /kue/ to /gve/, along rules like "voiceless stops
before [glide|w] voice, with [glide|w] becoming [fricative|v]".

Of course this doesn't always happen, as Greek *tw > s, but *dw > d (not *z)

Also, if a change can go one way it can generally go in reverse, even if it
seems counterintuitive: /k/ > /s/ before front vowels is familiar in Romance,
but /s/ > /k/ before front vowels is also found (some Ugric language?  I forget
the name, starts with M).

Armenian gets <erk> from *dw and <elb> from *bhr.   Umpteen different Greek
vowels all end up as /i/.  Castillian has /k/ > /T/ before front vowels.

You get chain shifts, where all the sounds in a series change at once, possibly
overlapping each other, like Grimm's law *dh, *d, *t > d, t, T.

The main point is that changes will go all over the map.   Large changes
(changes of more than one feature) will generally take place as a series of
steps, however--even if not all the intermediate steps are attested.


In my conlangs I generally try for realistic sound changes, although sometimes I
throw in strange stuff just for sake's sake.

In Hadwan,
*a e i o u > /A I I U U/.  Not strange.
*ei eu oi ou> /AI jU wI Uw/.  Odder.
*au > /Y/.  Weird.  (an intermediate stage *ø [o-slash] was there, if that makes
any more sense.)




    *Muke!
--
http://www.frath.net/

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