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

The glottal stop can affect tone, if you want to introduce tone.  It
can lead to either high or low, by different historical processes --
I'll try to find some examples within a single language family if you
want me to look it up.  I believe it will affect tone on the previous
vowel, but I don't know the specifics.  (For example, did it need to
be in the syllable coda to affect tone, or could it have been in the
following syllable's onset?  I don't know.)

Laryngealization of the vowel is another possibility.  I'm pretty sure
the laryngealization contrast in the Totonacan languages is derived
from an earlier alternation between V and V? (with the latter becoming
laryngealized V).  I could look this up as well, if needed.

Laryngealization or something like it can be a reasonable source for
low tone later on, if you want it.  Straight from glottal stop to tone
would most likely give you high, but if glottal stop goes to
laryngealization, you'll get low instead.

-- Pat

On 7/22/06, Eric Christopherson <rakko@...> wrote:
> 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.
>

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