Theiling Online    Sitemap    Conlang Mailing List HQ   

Re: Mutations of [k]

From:Nik Taylor <yonjuuni@...>
Date:Wednesday, August 20, 2003, 18:12
Tristan McLeay wrote:
> I think the process is called palatisation, but that's a pretty generic > term applied to a lot of things that happen because of the articulation > of front vowels. (So the process of generating a series of palatised > consonants would be called this, as would the [t]/[s] > [tS]/[S] / _i,j > change in Japanese (or are they [c] and [C]?).)
They're [tS] and [S]. [C] is an allophone of /h/ before /i/ and /j/ (e.g., hito "person" = [Ci_0to], hyaku "hundred" = [CakM_0]). Japanese also has a [tM] -> [tsM] (M = high back unrounded vowel) Also, /d/ and /z/ merge before high vowels as [dZi]/[(d)zM]. Incidentally, Ryukyuan, a relative of Japanese spoken in the Ryuukyuu Islands (the chain to the south of the main homeland, containing Okinawa) had a /ki/ -> /tSi/ sound change in addition to the /ti/ -> /tSi/ sound change of Standard Japanese. Standard Uatakassi had [ti] -> [tSi], [di] -> [dZi], [si] -> [Si], [zi] -> [Zi], [ki] -> [Ci], and [gi] -> [i]. Later sound changes then reintroduced the syllables [ti], [di], [ki] and [gi], tho those first two have since, for most speakers, undergone a secondary palatization to [tsi], [dzi], and a few speakers have changed [ki] and [gi] to [tsi] and [dzi] as well. Some dialects changed [ki] to [tSi] instead, causing /ti/ and /ki/ to merge. This caused the gender prefixes ti- "gender 2 (sentient female)" and ki- "gender 4 (animal associated with people)" to merge, so that gender 4 nouns were then merged with gender 5 (la- "animal not associated with people"). This merger later spread even to dialects where it was not phonetically motivated. -- "There's no such thing as 'cool'. Everyone's just a big dork or nerd, you just have to find people who are dorky the same way you are." - overheard ICQ: 18656696 AIM Screen-Name: NikTaylor42