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Re: Sound changes - whither retroflex sounds and glottal stop?

From:Kalle Bergman <seppu_kong@...>
Date:Monday, July 24, 2006, 11:40
Howdy

> With that out of the way, I want to ask if anyone > knows what kinds of > things a) retroflex consonants /.../ > can develop into
>From the top of my head; in my dialect of swedish,
/t`/ and /d`/ are frequently realized as [r`]. So is /l/, so maybe /t`, d`/ -> /r`/ -> /l/ is a possible route. /Kalle B --- Eric Christopherson <rakko@...> skrev:
> 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. >