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Re: A polymorphic language

From:Patrick Littell <puchitao@...>
Date:Tuesday, February 14, 2006, 16:50
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