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Re: /y/?

From:ROGER MILLS <rfmilly@...>
Date:Monday, January 14, 2008, 0:45
Henrik Theiling wrote:
>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).
I suppose it should remain a high vowel... but with incomplete fronting or rounding you might get u or i > [1] (barred i), rounded or not; or i or u > unrounded [M] or [U] (a very indistinct sound to my ear). I'm assuming some sort of umlauting or harmonizing env.; if it were just some sort of systematic phoneme, with an historical origin no longer in effect, then I suppose it could go anywhere in the high + tense/lax region, front/central/back; by a series of changes you might shift it from high/central to mid [@, 3, V] to low, and end up with [6]. If you keep it a front V, you might be able to coerce it to [&], fun!! Or maybe it could diphthongize > [oj] or [iw] ??? or reverse-diphthongize > [@w] or [@j]. Lots of possibilities, though not limitless without a radical sound change sequence.....:-))))) The sort of speculation I love!!!