phonemic confusion (was: kinsi rorotan:...)

Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...> writes:

> > I do have a double change related to this in one of the sister
> > languages
> > of my Senu Yivokuchi: [x] > [s] / _[+front] AND [s] > [x] / _[+back].
>
> If those changes occured simultaneously, wasn't there a period where confusions
> were possible?
You mean due to homonymy? Well, of course. And this was not the worst.
The Itrumi family, of which Senu Yivokuchi and other six or seven languages
are part, springs from a phonetically complicated ancient language, and
they've all suffered the loss and merging of many sounds. Senu Yivokuchi
is one of the most changed, having conflated nine vowels into five and
four series of stops (voiced, unvoiced, voiced 'aspirated' and unvoiced
aspirated) into just two (voiced and unvoiced, both non-aspirated). This
produced a lot of homonymy, which was solved in part (I think) by
redundant object incorporation (I don't know if this is a suitable
name, but it's what happens in Mandarin when you say, for example,
|chi fan| 'eat food' instead of simply |chi| 'eat'), and, for nouns,
compounding. For example:

    /wak/ 'jewel' > /wak lIhah/ 'jewel of value' > /waklI/ > /wakre/
    /wak_h/ 'projectile' > /wak_h pExr/ 'projectile thrown' > */wafexr/ > /waxar/

(the various shortenings are not regular; *this form is a hypothetical middle
stage, and the second /a/ in /waxar/ is an 'echo' of the first one, the
underlying form being //wafxr// > //waxr//).


--Pablo Flores
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