Re: History of Yasaro

John Vertical wrote:

> There's a thred with fairly comprehensiv lists of sound changes over a
> certain period (many of the Latin  to Romance chains included) in the
> L&L Museum of the ZBB. I think it masq'rades under the name of
> "Correspondence Library".
Thanks, I'll chek this thred out. :-)

>> Between Middle Yasaro and Modern Yasaro, /a~/ and /u~/ merged to a
>> single phoneme, /o~/ (but both /a~/ and /u~/ are preserved in the
>> spelling). Before stops, a homorganic nasal was inserted after a nasal
>> vowel (/e~p/ > /e~mp/), and the vowel then lost its nasality (/e~mp/ >
>> /emp/). The question now is where did the nasal vowel come from in the
>> first place? Does it make sense for /em/ to turn into /e~/ at some
>> point, then go back to /em/? But I can't think of many other
>> reasonable sources for nasal vowels. Could a sequence like /kna/ turn
>> into /ka~/?
>
> 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~:/ ?

> 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 Simîk). Or ejectives / glottalization
could be an areal feature of otherwise unrelated languages, which would
simplify things.

> 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, beïng 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.

> /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.

> Or how about fortiting stressed /s/ to /ts/ and then shifting this
> universally to /tS/ & relocating stress?
I'm running out of places to relocate stress. A word like /su:_Fri/
"hammered dulcimer" would originally have been stressed on the first
syllable, /'su:ri/, while /sa_Rva/ "white" would have been stressed on
the second syllable, /sa'va/.

> Something to the extent of /t@k/ > /tk/ > /tS/ might work too. If you
> don't have much consonant clusters, positing dropped schwas might be
> more trouble than it's work ... but an additional tweak could be to
> interbreed this with palatalization and only collapse, say, unstressed
> /tis kis tit tik kit kik/.
>
> John Vertical
>