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

On 21/07/06, Eric Christopherson <rakko@...> wrote:

> 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.
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.

> 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.
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/.

--
Tristan

Reply