Re: Phonology and Questions

> yl-ruil wrote:
> stop     p, p'            t, t'             k, k'          q, q'
Rather unusual (perhaps unprecedented) to have ejectives with no voicing
distinctions.

> fric       f, f'              s, s'            x, x'       h, h'
I'm not even sure if /x'/ and /X'/ would be *possible*.

> Vowels are a, ä, e, ë, i, ï, o, ö, u and ü. They retain their
> "classical" quality. The diariesis marks voicelessness.
A voicing distinction in vowels but NOWHERE ELSE?

> 1) Kansú has a pitch-accent, but the placement of this is highly
> irregular, and not all words are accented. I really can't find a way
> to resolve this into a rule for accent in Qanhësunhï
How about a lost sound?  You could have, say, a pharyngeal sound.
Perhaps in Q., the stress was on the vowel (or latest vowel if more than
one) following the pharyngeal consonant.  Words without a pharyngeal
consonant automatically placed the stress on a fixed position.  Are the
accentless words of a specific class?  If so, they could've lost their
stress at some point.  This would especially make sense if those words
were pronouns and adpositions.

> How did the pitch-accent occur in any real languages?
I don't know, but W evolved it via ordinary stress.  What happened was
that the stressed vowel became high-pitched, and any following vowels
became high-pitched as well, being influenced by a native substrate.

> 2) Are there any natlangs with voiceless vowels? I can only think of
> Cheyenne.
Japanese uses it as an allophone of voiced vowels.

> 4) Totally off-topic, what is the origin of the Latin and Celtic -b-
> future? AFAIK it's an areal feature, but where does it come from? Is
> is from IE bhu "to be", as an infix?
Yep, but the term is "suffix".  An infix goes inside the root itself, as
if ama:- became *amba:o in the future.

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