Re: Saying "Thank you."

Jesse Bangs wrote:

> > As he said, it does indeed arise from external borrowing. IIRC, the
> only
> > known cases of a fricative to stop shift occur in Papua New Guinea.  It
> is
> > at any rate an extremely rare type of sound change.
>
> Eh?  I was under the impression that [T] > [t] and [D] > [d] were fairly
> common. [...]
>
> At other places of articulation, the change is less common, though.
You're right -- I forgot about how typologically marked the interdentals are.
The principle does hold, as you say, quite well in other places of articulation.
I was thinking of one PNG language's (Motu's?) shift *s > t.

> They occur in many dialects of English where you can hear [wIt
> d&t] for [wIT D&t].
To be fair, at least some of this in American dialects probably comes from
the extensive creolization that occurred during the shipping of slaves to the
New World. Also, at least one British dialect that has lost these fricatives,
Cockney, has shifted them to the labiodental fricatives [f] and [v], respectively,
not to the nearest stop equivalents.

===================================
Thomas Wier | AIM: trwier

"Aspidi men Saiôn tis agalletai, hên para thamnôi
  entos amômêton kallipon ouk ethelôn;
autos d' exephugon thanatou telos: aspis ekeinê
  erretô; exautês ktêsomai ou kakiô" - Arkhilokhos

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