Re: II Silindion Returns! (Longish)

Elliott Lash wrote: (BTW welcome back)

> Proto-Nestean Consonant Inventory
> Regular:  Aspirate:  Palatal:  Labial:
> t  d       th  dh     tj dj    tw  dw
> p  b       ph  bh     pj bj    pw  bw
> k  g       kh  gh     kj gj    kw  gw
>
> Glottal:   Pre-Nasal:   Fricative:    Lateral:
> t?         nt  nd        s             l
> p?         mp  mb        S (<shut>)    lj
> k?         Nk  Ng                      l?
>
> Question 1: can one have voiced glottalized
> obstruents?
>
Assuming you mean a "voiced ejective" (with the same mechanism as a voicelss
one), I think that's physically impossible.  There can't be any voicing if
the glottis is closed, as it has to be for an ejective..  (This was
discussed a few weeks ago, not everyone agreed, of course.)  You might be
able to fudge it one of two ways:  (1) voiced stop with glottalized release
affecting the vowel (creaky voice?) or (2) preglottalized voiced stop or
ingressive voiced stop-- they could pattern the same way as /p?/ etc, just
realized differently.  (I think Sapir's "Psychological Reality of the
Phoneme" discusses something similar-- one of his informants had learned to
write his language in Sapir's system, which used "p!, t!" etc for the
ejectives.  There was also a series of glottalized nasals and resonants [?m,
?y] etc.-- and the informant also wrote these as "m!, y!")

I encountered a language in Indonesia that had plain, prenasalized and
preglottalized voiced stops.  The latter were very hard to hear in initial
position, though not in intervocalic.

How do you figure /l?/ was pronounced? (I assume it's a unit, not a
cluster).

> Labial:
> tw  dw    pw  nw     dw  nw
> pw  bw    pw  w      bw  w
> kw  gw    kw  w      gw  w
>
Initial tw > pw??? Strange, but not impossible I guess.

> Pre-Nasal:
> nt  nd      t    nd     n   n
> mp  mb      p    b      m   m
> Nk  Ng      Nk   Ng     Nk  Ng
>
Any reason why the velars did not simplify?  My favorite natlang, Buginese,
treated these as follows (medial only):
nt, mp, nc, Nk > geminate vl. stop
nd > nr; but mb, nj, Ng > mp, nc, Nk

A related language had:
voiceless NC > geminate vl.C
voiced NC > geminate nasal

(snip the rest-- very interesting however.  I've got the shift voiced stop >
continuant > resonant in Gwr; they then affect surrounding vowels-- it's one
way to reduce 2-syl. CVCV(C) bases to CV(C), and derive 9 vowels and a slew
of diphthongs from four vowels....still under construction.)

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