Re: YACQ: Plausibility of a sound change

On Fri, Feb 16, 2001 at 12:00:51PM +0100, Tommaso R. Donnarumma wrote:
> This is very plausible, I think, but rather boring, so I
> decided to assign a three-way distinction to the proto-
> language:
>
>    PROTO-LANGUAGE  KLUNA      THE R. A. LANG.
>    voiceless       voiceless  voiced
>    glottalised     aspirated  voiced
>    aspirated       aspirated  voiceless
I don't really understand how the glottalized series would come to be voiced
in RA, unless my assumption that by "glottalized" you mean "ejective" is
wrong. However, I have heard of such a correspondence in a few cases, though
in those cases also it really puzzles me. (The two cases I know of are a)
ancient Egyptian - it appears that some ejectives become voiced stops later
on, although it's controversial; and b) the "glottalic hypothesis" of
Proto-Indo-European (PIE), which posits the series voiceless:voiced:ejective
where the traditional PIE hypothesis has voiceless:"voiced aspirate":voiced.
Of course the latter example is also a big problem because the glottalic
hypothesis is very controversial, so PIE might not have even had ejectives.)

--
Eric Christopherson / *Aiworegs Ghristobhorosyo
Conlang code:
CU !lh:m cN:R:S:G a+ y n2d:1d !R* A-- E L* N1 Id:m k- ia- p+ m- o+ P-- d* b+++ lainesco

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