Re: your opinion

On Mon, 31 Dec 2007 17:11:15 -0500, Reilly Schlaier <schlaier@...>
wrote:

>doesnt seem to have sent through the original message
I did see it, but it was missing some parts.

>>- the [i\] that only appears by epenthesis in final clusters
>
>my thought was [n=] > [@n] > [I\n] > [i\n]
Which is fine by itself, but if you have for /I/ before a retroflex: [I] >
[I\] > [M_x] > [U] (no distinction between /I Y U/ in that position, right?)
the epenthetic [I\] should probably get dragged along too. Probably only the
first step of that was conditioned; I can recall reading of a parallel of
sorts from Norwegian, where [E] > [&] generally before retroflexes, but
after [l:] >> [r`] and [s\] >> [s`], these new retroflexes do not cause the
same change anymore. So it seems it was the [r] in the former clusters such
as [rt rn] that originally triggered [E] > [&], not the retroflex [t` n`]
etc. that they became. Here it's the consonants that proceeded to change
after the initial phase, not the vowels, but still: allophony ceases to be a
"process" very soon, and becomes just a form of alternation. It's not rare
that speakers can tell various allophones of a single phoneme apart, ie.
consider them distinctiv sounds, even if they're not used as such in their
language, yet.


>>[i y u] and [I Y U] only contrasting in *unstressed* syllables is also a bit
>>surprizing, but IMO it adds some nice flavor (and might signal the
>>beginnings of a stress system change?)
>
>the stress is a new thing for me ive never used it before so it is based,
>with some obvious tweaks like where the stress falls, on my own speech patterns
Well, there's a precedent then :)

John Vertical