THEORY; Allophones

On Mon, 5 Apr 1999 20:53:14 -0300 FFlores <fflores@...> writes:
>Is there any natlang or conlang where an allophone
>of a certain phoneme is also an allophone (maybe the
>only one) of *another* phoneme? Do you think that's
>likely or probable?
>--Pablo Flores
In natlangs, Hebrew has some.  In most dialects, _bet_ without a dagesh
is pronounced [v], the same as the letter _vav_.  Ashkenazic
pronounciation has the dageshless _tav_ ("saf"), and the letters _samekh_
and _ssin_ all as [s].  All Hebrew dialects today have [s] for both
_samekh_ and _ssin_....it's unclear what the _ssin_ originally was.
Israeli and Ashkenazic dialects have [x] for _hhet_ and dageshless _kaf_,
and [k] for _quf_ and _kaf_ with a dagesh.

In conlangs, Rokbeigalmki doesn't really have *allophones* like this, but
the letters /dZ/ and /z/ both 'soften' to /Z/, so that _wajh_ "settler"
and _wazh_ "doer" are both pronounced [waZ].

Talking about which, today i spent a lot of time fixing up the
Rokbeigalmki-Ziifer font i have on my computer.  I tried to make a font
with every letter plain, tilde'd, smitchik'd, and accent'd, but for some
reason it messed up.  And the Keyboard Manager program i have and was
going to use to make 'macros' for each diacritic'd letter could only read
the first 255 characters anyway.  ohwell.


-Stephen (Steg)
 "i must confess that my loneliness is killing me now, don't you know i
still believe?"

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