Re: /y/?

Quoting "T. A. McLeay" <conlang@...>:

> Henrik Theiling wrote:
> > Hi!
> >
> > Yesterday I was wondering what interesting stuff could happen to an
> > /y/ phoneme?  Same question about the lax variant /Y/.
> >
> > The only (boring) thing I could come up with was /y/ > /i/ unrounding
> > as seen in so many languages (German dialects, Icelandic, Greek,
> > Kreyol Ayisyen, to name only a few).
> >
> > This question came up when I thought about sound shifts where
> > labialisation spreads to vowels, e.g. when German 'schlimm' is
> > pronounced [SlYm] (instead of [SlIm]) or 'bischen' like ['bYSn=]
> > (instead of [bIsC@n]).  So with [I] > [Y], a shift to [I] is really
> > boring, so I was searching for something else for additional
> > spiciness.
>
> Didn't /y:/ become something like /2y/ in Dutch along with a similar
> change to /i:/ ? ISTR our Swedish friends saying there's some frication
> in some dialects of Swedish, something like /i/ > [z=] and /y/ to
> [z=_w]. Probably I'm forgetting some other diacritic, too. And I have no
> idea what a syllabic /z/ would change into anyway, possibly epenthetic
> vowels along the lines of /i/ > [iz] and /u/ > [uz]. But then: why bother?
Syllabic [z_w] and [z\_w] indeed occurs as realizations of Sw. /y/. Does it have
to change any further? Syllabic fricatives are surely pretty spicy!

Historically, Sw. *y in some positions breaks to _ju_, originally probably [ju]
or thereabouts, today short [j8], long [j2_w:] (with dialectal variations - I
have [ju\:] for the long version). Definitely biphonemic today but presumably
originally not.

Original short /i y/ has often become /e 2/ in modern Swedish (sometimes
lengthened).

Gutnish apparently has /y:/ > /2i/.

 Andreas

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