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Sound changes - whither retroflex sounds and glottal stop?

From:Eric Christopherson <rakko@...>
Date:Saturday, July 22, 2006, 5:31
Hi, list!  I've been away for a long time, but I've been pulled back
in to the list and conlanging in general lately.  For those of you
who don't know, my main conlangs are Lainesco, which was a Romance
language inspired by Spanish and Portuguese, and Dhakrathat, an a
priori language that I've started over mostly from scratch several
times.  I'm now one of several people working on a descendant of an
already-created protolanguage.

With that out of the way, I want to ask if anyone knows what kinds of
things a) retroflex consonants and b) glottal stop can develop into
-- i.e. what they actually HAVE developed into in real-world
languages, or more-or-less reasonable hypothetical outcomes.  I've
seen the question of where retroflex sounds *come from* treated here,
but not what becomes of them.

Right now, I've tentatively made them develop into something roughly
palatal - either fully palatal or palatalized alveolar or alveolar + /
j/.  This doesn't feel very realistic to me, though.  I suppose they
could easily become alveolar, but that doesn't satisfy me since I
don't want them to merge with the existing alveolars.

As for glottal stop, I know it can drop out completely, and combine
with other consonants to form glottalized ones, and I think in modern
Nahuatl at least it comes out as /h/.  I have an intuition that it
might become /N/, but that might be a stretch.

Replies

Patrick Littell <puchitao@...>
Tristan Alexander McLeay <conlang@...>
Henrik Theiling <theiling@...>
Paul Bennett <paul-bennett@...>
Kalle Bergman <seppu_kong@...>