Re: Mutations of [k]

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.

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