Re: Tendencies of Sound Changes?

Quoting Nik Taylor <yonjuuni@...>:

> John Vertical wrote:
> > By "loss" I mean the loss of the whole phoneme, while leaving the rest
> > of the stops in place. I thought Samoan was the only language completely
> > lacking /k/? Also, are there any languages that have deleted /b/ without
> > deleting /p/ or /d g/ too?
>
> The Kauaian dialect of Hawiian lacked /k/, using /t/ instead (which the
> standard dialect lacked), so that the local name for the island was
> Taua'i, and they referred to the king who united the islands as
> Tamehameha rather than Kamehameha.
Does the use of the past tense imply that the dialect has died out, or just that
it has since carried out the t>k shift?

                                                  Andreas

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