Re: Sound changes

Quoting JS Bangs <jaspax@...>:

> 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),
I'm not so sure about that.  There are a plenty of cases
attested where a consonant shifts its place of articulation
without any conditioning environment.  The shift of s > h
is only the most common of such shifts, but other less
intuitive shifts do occur.  At one stage in the evolution of
Arapaho, /p/ shifted universally to /k/ (losing labial
obstruents) and two languages that I've studied, Onondaga
and Atkan Aleut, both lack *all* labials in native vocabulary,
and I suspect that this was a result of merger with other
consonants and not loss.  In all of these cases, the shift
is never random:  there are basically always good acoustic
grounds, even if these grounds do not appear obvious.
Arapaho is full of such changes.   And these are in *human*
languages, not alien languages that Herman is describing.

> and you reverse several well-attested phonological processes.
> /T/ > /f/ and /D/ > /v/ are both plausible, but their reverses
> are essentially unknown.
I think Herman came up with a plausible anatomically
grounded response to this criticism, although you are
probably correct with respect to human languages.

> 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/
Many of the rules Marc Picard used to derive Arapaho from
Proto-Algonkian are precisely such changes.

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Thomas Wier
Dept. of Linguistics  "Nihil magis praestandum est quam ne pecorum ritu
University of Chicago sequamur antecedentium gregem, pergentes non qua
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