Re: sound change question

On Thu, 25 Jan 2001, Eric Christopherson wrote:

> On Wed, Jan 24, 2001 at 11:34:33AM -0800, jesse stephen bangs wrote:
> > Yoon Ha Lee sikayal:
> >
> > > Is it reasonable to have [c] and [c_h] (aspirated) evolve eventually into
> > > the affricates [dZ] (gains voicing) and [tS]?  The change *sounds*
> > > reasonable to me, but I am loath to trust my intuition.
> >
> > Sounds very reasonable, although the palatalization should probably be
> > motivated by something (a following high vowel or front vowel or
> > [j]).  Otherwise it seems very good.  Are you going c > g > dZ or c > tS >
> > dZ?  It might make a difference.
(humbly)  I was thinking it would go to [tj] and then to [tS], then
bunches of things would go to their voiced forms between vowels, hence
[dZ], and something would happen later to make the two contrast.

> It needn't be motivated like that, though. The "satem" PIE languages all
> underwent a change from plain velars to palatal or alveolar or
> alveolo-palatal fricatives (presumably passing through an affricate stage),
> no matter what sound followed. The water's muddied a bit by the persistent
> tendency to call PIE velars "palatals" even though (AFAIK) they are not now
> commonly thought to have been palatal in articulation. According to
> Andrew Sihler in _New Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin_, it's very
> unlikely for actual palatal stops to become velar, and there are some other
> reasons to believe that the oldest forms of that series of stops were in
> fact velar and that the palatal reflexes were innovations.
<blink>  Interesting.  What I'm struggling with is whether sound changes
come in herds or lone horses, and that was a "lone horse" I was worried
about.  :-p  I confess some of the sound changes are inspired more by
Japanese; I did look at Latin for inspiration, but the case system went
active instead of nominative/accusative.

YHL