Re: A polymorphic language

On 2/14/06, Rob Haden <magwich78@...> wrote:
> On Tue, 14 Feb 2006 14:17:35 +0000, Peter Bleackley
> <Peter.Bleackley@...> wrote:
> >To do this, I'm going to start off with an ancestor language with a more
> >simple and predictable morphology. The phonemic inventory will be
> >
> >p t  k ?
> >f s  x h
> >w r j
> >m n  N
> >
> >i  u
> >
> >  a
> >
> The only phonemes I see discouraging allophony are the (bi)labial ones, due
> to their disconnection with tongue articulation.  However, you may be
> satisfied with having simple coarticulations (i.e. palatalized, plain (=
> null), labialized) for this series.
Or your could have no labial series in the protolanguage (or one that
was lenited away), and derive your new /p/ from */kw/, etc.  Combined
with Peter's suggestion, this would give you

*/ky/ > /tS/
*/k/ > /k/
*/kw/ > /p/

Here's a similar alternation, from Tzotzil:

/hi/ => [yi]
/ha/ => [ha]
/hu/ => [vu]

At least that's how I remember it; I can't find a reference at the
moment.  This doesn't occur for all /h/'s; there's an /h/ phoneme that
undergoes this change and one that doesn't.  I think one of them was
historically /x/, but I don't know which.  (I'm also not sure of the
exact articulation of that [v]; it could be any of a number of things.
 [v] suffices for our purposes.)

-- Pat