Re: Tendencies of Sound Changes?

John Vertical wrote:
> 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.
Ancient Greek shows *s > h/0 (at least in some environments), and IIRC some
of the Persian langs. do too. Of course, IE had no other fricatives to
lose... French lost *s in certain environments; Spanish may be in the
process. But it's noteworthy that this is not a common change in IE
languages.

I was thinking more in terms of the Austronesian family, where it is common
(and they represent a fairly large % of the world's languages)-- many
Polynesian lgs., and assorted lgs. in the Indonesian area.
>
> > > 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.
Hmm, I didn't interpret that as "total loss". So unless /b/ actually merges
with some other phoneme in the system (resulting in loss of a contrast), the
shifts b > B/v/w simply replace one phoneme with a new one. My other ex., g
merging with k/N does result in the loss of a contrastive phoneme.

> But if you mean that /t d/ may resist _selective_ lenition, yes, that
> seems more plausible.
They do seem more resistant to change.

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