From: "John Vertical" <johnvertical@...>
Sent: Saturday, April 01, 2006 7:47 PM
> Anyway ... sounds shifts always require a context. Yes,
> medial voicing is more likely than medial devoicing; but
> what about elsewhere? Devoicing might be preferred in
> global shifts... or maybe stop-cluster harmonizing... I
> think I missed the mention alluded by Carsten so I can't
> say for sure.
I think I meant medial voicing.
> One thing that's fairly safe to say is that out of the six
> "basic stops", only /p g/ are prone to loss by
> fricativization. The others I think go only in chain
> shifts or conditioned changes - you don't get stuff like
> /t/ suddendly dropping to /T/ all by itself without a
> reason. There's also the fact that /w/ goes to /v/ offen
> but only rarely to /G/ (ie. acts primarily as a labial
> when fricativizing.)
See the Germanic Sound Shifts ...
> Also palatal stops affricatize easily and nasals easily
> assimilate to POA of a following oral stop, but this is
> pretty common knowledge already, I think.
It is.
OK, thank you all. I'll have a look at that page Arthaey
linked to again as well.
Cheers,
Carsten