From: "Peter Clark" <peter-clark@...>
> I know the Great English Vowel shift, Grimm's Law, and a couple of
others,
> but not much more than that. This is a pretty limited field to get ideas for
> sound changes. What changes to r, and what does r change to?
Hehe... /t/ and /d/ and /G/ and /X/ and /4/ and /r\`/ and /r\/ and /l/ and /z/
and /Z/ and /h/ and /x/ change with /r/.
Yeah I know it's cheating that half of them are rhotic to begin with ;p
(Bonus points: give examples.)
> Furthermore, I
> don't know how common certain sound changes are. For instance, which has a
> higher degree of probability: k > x or x > k?
Stuff like that might look at universals: are fricatives more common than
stops
in the environment we're looking at? then /k/ might be more likely to change
to
/x/...
> So the ideal dictionary would cover as many sounds as we can think
of,
along
> with a rough approximation of the likelihood of such a change. A three or
> four value scale of infrequent-occasionaly-common-often would give
> wiggle-room while still giving a good idea of the possibility. For instance,
> VhV > VV would probably be classified as "often," while VV > VhV would
> probably be "infrequent."
Shouldn't have to be infrequent. A lang encountering VV that has a CV
syll-structure might easily insert /h/ or /?/ in borrowed words or retain such
an epenthetic consonant in the disappearance of a former consonant (karokomak
>
xaroxomax > harohoma... to make up an example)
> However, all of this would be too much for me to research, so here's
where I
> would need some help in gathering data. What say you all? Is this a project
> that people would find useful and helpful?
Sounds cool.
> I'm willing to compile the data
> into presentation form, but I need a wide data sample, preferably from
> different language families.
Well, there's a lot of stuff out there... Latin > Romance changes are easy to
find, and PIE changes too (though they may not be as useful since the starting
sounds aren't entirely certain)...
*Muke!
--
http://www.frath.net/