Lateral affricates > ?

At 8:48 PM -0600 2/27/03, Danny Wier wrote:
>Which leads me to a question:
>
>I've read of cases in Northeast Caucasian languages, and Nostratic (if
>it existed), that lateral affricates became velars or uvulars. And
>Afro-Asiatic /tl/ and /tl'/ correspond to velars /k/ and /g/ in
>Indo-European and /x/ in Kartvelian.
>
>This might explain the possibility of P-Sem /tl'/ (Arabic /d./) being
>realized as /q/ in a form of Aramaic.
>
>Did this happen in any other families, like Na-Dene or Uto-Aztecan?
In Uto-Aztecan, the lateral affricates are confined to the Aztecan branch (part
of Southern UA); they are a development of PUA *t which occurred before *a. The
ubiquitous word-final <tl> of Nahuatl is the reflex of the PUA absolutive
suffix *-ta. (The Uto-Aztecan absolutive is not a case suffix; it indicates
that a noun is not in composition with another stem, postposition or
possessive. In modern UA languages, the absolutive is sometimes used as a
nominalizer.)

Dirk
--
Dirk Elzinga                                               Dirk_Elzinga@byu.edu

"It is important not to let one's aesthetics interfere with the appreciation of
fact." - Stephen Anderson