Re: Tendencies of Sound Changes?

Roger Mills wrote:
>Another change that's very common: s > h (>0)
I'm not sure what you mean by that. x > h, for example, is much more
probable. Universal loss of s, to my knowledge, generally requires all other
fricatives to have withered away already.


> > 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/.
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?

But if you mean that /t d/ may resist _selective_ lenition, yes, that seems
more plausible.

John Vertical

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