/y/?

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.

Bye,
  Henrik

Replies