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

From:Tristan Alexander McLeay <conlang@...>
Date:Saturday, July 22, 2006, 6:06
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

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Roger Mills <rfmilly@...>