Re: Proposed Sound change

On Wed, 8 Nov 2000 21:11:42 -0500 Nik Taylor <fortytwo@...> writes:
> Uatakassí has a bias against /u/.  In grammatical suffixes, it's not
...
> then derounded, so /u/ -> /y/ -> /i/ and /o/ -> /2/ -> /e/.
>
> Anyways, I want to balance it out a bit in descendant langs.  One
> thought I had was the following:
>
> /i:/ -> /ji/ -> /ju/ (dissimilation) -> /u/
>
> Does this seem reasonable?  I got the idea for the third phase from
> Spanish uo -> ue
Sounds reasonable to me. And even if it ain't, it don't matter on
conlang.

Though I will say, and this is my opinion -- if vowel A and vowel B tend
to migrate in one direction, vowel C probably will go the same way. So I
would imagine that more likely /u:/ would tend toward /i:/. The Spanish
shift is a good idea, and Russian has the shift /je/ > /jo/ in many cases
where you have stress migrating to that palatalizing vowel.

Or you could have a conlang with no rounded vowels, or do your conpeople
have lips...

DaW.