Re: Voiced Velar Fricative
From: | John Cowan <jcowan@...> |
Date: | Wednesday, October 25, 2000, 16:50 |
And Rosta wrote:
> Cool fact. How trustworthy/well-documented is it?
It's in *The World's Major Languages_, which is generally reckoned reliable.
> It's as though final
> /h/ (from /s/) transmogrifies into an autosegment that triggers ATR-ish
> harmony (with stressed vowels immune?), which suggests that H-ness
> and ATR-ness are phonologically the same thing.
I think the historical sequence is that the fronting was associated with
/h/ in the coda, and when /h/ went away, the fronting remained. Why
"stressed vowels immune?" The "s" in "casa" survives because it is in
the onset, not because the preceding vowel is stressed, IMHO.
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