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

Paul Bennett wrote:
>
>Eric Christopherson wrote:
> > 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.
>
>The change /?/ -> /N/ I think is documented in Nenets (or a related
>natlang?)
>
>Paul
To my kno'lij, this change occured word-initially in at least Nenets and
Nganasan (& quite possibly in a few other Samoyedic languages, too.) I
thought it was /0/ > /N/ however, but checking sum' resorces there indeed
seems to exist a /?/ phoneme in the languages.

Anyway, how about reverse Hawai'ianism: /?/ > /k/ (or /q/)? I've herd
reports of epenthetic /k/ appearing between vowels ex_nihilo in some
languages, which does seem to sort of set a precedent...

And for a slightly more bizarre suggestion, how about epiglottalization: /?/
 > />\/ ? After lerning how to pronounce epiglottals in the first place,
I've found myself surprizingly prone to this substitution in sum' contexts
(esp. word-initially); probably mainly because epiglottals do not interfere
with voicing.

John Vertical
(back after a thirtnight country excursion...)