Re: Tendencies of Sound Changes?

John Vertical wrote:
> I'd say that languages have actual shifts and groups of languages have
> tendencies.
Good. Another change that's very common: s > h (>0)
>
> 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...
At least in terms of one lang.family, that's true: in the development from
Proto Austronesian > Proto Oceanic, all vd/vl pairs of stops > vl. (and all
nasal+stop NC also > N+vl.stop).

> 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.
I think we could enlarge that to labial and velar stops generally /p b k g/.
Interestingly, in Jakobsonian distinctive feature notation, these form a
"natural class" in that all are [+grave]. Again, in many AN subgroups in
Indonesia, we have p > f > h > 0, b > B or w (> h/0 in one area I know of),
k > ? > 0; while g tends to merge either with k or sometimes with N.

Another phenomenon in SE Asian languages is the gradual loss of final
consonants-- Matisoff called it a "continuum of consonantal attrition"
w.r.t. the Sino-Tibetan langs. he was working with; it's also evident in
Austronesian:

Formosa/Philippines: final vd/vl stops
Malay and many Indo. langs: only final vl.
Moluccas: only vl, with *p/k tending > ?
--Moluccan subgroups some only t,?, others all > 0
Some subgoups (on Sulawesi, non-Moluccan) also all > 0, but often retained
in suffixes

Proto Oceanic only ptk (with various survivals in Melanesia, but lost
~retained in suffixes by the time of Fiji/Polynesian.

Similar developments of the other possible finals (r,l,s, the nasals).

I can't think of anything similar in the IE area; of course that's because
stem-final C were protected by suffixes. In the Asian case, the final C has
very low functional load, consequently is prone to loss.

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