Re: History of Yasaro

John Vertical wrote:

>> 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�k). Or ejectives /
>> glottalization could be an areal feature of otherwise unrelated
>> languages, which would simplify things.
Just when you'd think at least plain ISO-8859-1 would be safe to send
through the mail, something as commonplace as i-circumflex (the second i
in Simik) gets mangled....

> 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...
Yes, that's the sort of thing I had in mind. At this point, though,
trying to link "unrelated" languages together might be more trouble than
it's worth.

>> /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>.)
I was thinking of short vowels, specifically /tSi/. I suppose it could
have come from /tje/ < /tie/, but then /tSe/ would need explanation --
/tSe/ < /tia/ ? While it's possible I could get this to work after some
experimentation, I think I'll go with the simpler /tS/ < /tr/.