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

Tristan Alexander McLeay wrote:
> On 21/07/06, Eric Christopherson <rakko@...> wrote:
(For unknown reasons, I never received the original msg., read it in the
archive).
>
> > 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.  > >
> > 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.
Yes, that seems the easy way out....
>
> You *could* just leave them as is, then :) Making them into
> palato-alveolars (af)fricatives i.e. [tS dZ S Z] seems pretty
> plausible to me tho; they sound alike to my ears.
Or retroflexed affricates, [t`s`, d`z`] (do I have those right?)--
Vietnamese IIRC has a contrast of the former (written "tr") with alv.palatal
[tS] (written "ch") (as does my conlang Gwr).

alv/dental/retr./tap/trill/approx. "r" can go in many directions--
retroflexed s`, z`, S, Z, y, l, n, d, etc. etc.

The reconstructed retro. *d. of Proto-Austronesian generally > r (or later
l), more rarely y (can also > dZ), versus the alv. or dental *d which
usually remains a stop (but can also > r).

>
> > 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/.
As it does in Malay and Javanese and their close relatives (but it is
reconstructed as an uvular stop *q, which survives in Formosan langs.)

 I have an intuition that it
> > might become /N/, but that might be a stretch.
Agree.
>
> I have read a hypothesis that the preaspirated stops in some North
> Germanic dialects & languages (e.g. Icelandic, some western(?)
> Norwegian) originate from preglottalised stops (much like the way in
> English, syllable-final unvoiced stops tend to be glottalised i.e.
> "stop" /stOp/ [stO?p]/[stOp_?]), so that reinforces the possibility of
> becoming /h/.
Sounds like a very probable development. Clusters of ?+stop might also be
phonologized as geminate~"long" consonants (esp. if voiceless); if voiced,
they might > implosives.  ?+C could also metathesize and become an ejective.

In addition to the tonal changes that [?] might cause (mentioned by Patrick
Littell), it might also lead to a short:long V contrast-- -V? > short V, -V
> long. It might also lead to lowered or centralized high vowels.