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

On Sat, 22 Jul 2006 00:31:31 -0500, Eric Christopherson <rakko@...>
wrote:
[...]
>Right now, I've tentatively made [retroflexes] 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.
Retroflexes becoming palatals seems possible to me.  As a possible natlang
example, at least according to Wikipedia, the [J\] in the Natsilingmiutut
variety of Inuktitut developed from a retroflex, apparently [z`].  Except,
really, the article's not exceedingly clear on which direction the
development went, and I may have it backward: see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inuit_language_phonology_and_phonetics .

>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.
Well, there is the phenomenon of rhinoglottophilia, which Wikipedia vaguely
defines as "the connection between glottal and nasal articulations".  I
think it's been cited as responsible for changes such as vowels becoming
nasalized in the vicinity of glottals.   OTOH [?] > [N] itself seems
unlikely; [? h] are pretty much the end of the line for sound change, and
don't become much of anything except for zero (and maybe each other), I think.

Alex