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Re: History of Yasaro

From:John Vertical <johnvertical@...>
Date:Thursday, June 15, 2006, 15:52
> > I suspect /kna/ would initially be more likely break to /k@~na/, but you > > could then apply nasal spreading to get /k@~na~/ and then elide the /@n/ > > part... > >Possibly, but it still seems a little contrived. Maybe if an /N/ were >involved ... /kna/ > /kNa/ > /k@~N\a/ > /k@~a:/ > /ka~:/ ?
That could make the elision of the nasal more plausible. It doesn't seem to work after non-velars, however.
> > There's also a phenomenon called "rhinoglottophilia" where glottals or > >glottalization may spontaneously induce nasality in vowels: /ka?/ > /ka~/ > >Now that's something I haven't heard of, and maybe I could link Yasaro to >some older Zireen languages (like Tenai) which have ejective stops (one of >the sources of tones in Sim&#65533;k). Or ejectives / glottalization could >be an areal feature of otherwise unrelated languages, which would simplify >things.
According to what I've read, it's mainly final [h ?], sometimes glottalized (creaky) vowels too, but not really glottal*ized* consonants. But developing eg. /?t/ > /~t/ or /t_>/ in different daughter languages might be more like it...
> > Oh, there's a multitude of possibilities for generating /tS/. If you > >wish to retain /ki/, the next most obvious ones are probably /ti tj kj/. > >/j/ in clusters has the good side that it can just disappear in the > >process - no need to jumble vowels afterwards to phonemize the > affricate. >(Besides, be&#65533;ng an "extremity" vowel, regenerating /i/ tends > to >follow always the same few patterns; not much room for originality.) > >/ti/ is at least as common in Yasaro as /ki/ if not more so; /tj/ /kj/ and >so on are possibilities, but if these existed in the older languages, other >clusters probably existed as well. Unless /j/ came from /i/, but then /ji/ >seems problematic.
If the /j/ were produced by vowel breaking, it wouldn't be all that impossible that it would afterwards just disappear, leaving only traces of palatalization. (Cf. English <ew>, <ue>.)
> > /tr kr tl kl/ could work too (possibly via /ts)`/ or /tK)/), but IMO > >/pl/ starts to sound a bit far-fetched. > >I was thinking of Latin plorare > Portuguese chorar, /pl/ > /S/, which is >pretty close to /pl/ > /tS/ and could possibly be adapted. But most likely >/tr/ or /kr/, especially since /r/ is really [z`] in Yasaro. /tK/ is >another interesting possibility, since /K/ is frequent in Zireen languages >but absent in Yasaro.
IMO /pl/ > /S/ sounds pretty idiosyncratic... Given those circumstances, /tr kr/ looks the most likely (to me anyway.) John Vertical

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Herman Miller <hmiller@...>