Re: Proposal: Sound Change Documentation Project

At 4:29 pm -0500 28/4/02, Peter Clark wrote:
>On Sunday 28 April 2002 10:37, Raymond Brown wrote:
>
>> Ruen Ren chao makes a similar observation in "Language and Symbolic
>> Systems".  He shows how ancient Chinese /ni/ "two" has become /a/ in the
>> Yanghow dialect, detailing all the intermediate steps (most of which are
>> still attested somewhere in existing 'dialects' and which the restrictions
>> of ASCII prevent my showing very easily); and then adds:
>> "If /ni/ can change into /a/, then practically anything can change into
>> anything"
>
>        That's great--but what's important is the steps. That is exactly
>the kind of
>thing I want to document; how one sound changes over time into a completely
>unrelated sound. I assume you still have the book/article? Could you either
>make a stab at transcibing it into ASCII
OK - I'm using X-SAMPA.  Note the ordinary apostrophe ' denotes
palatalization, and the reversed apostrophe ` denotes retroflex
pronunciation.

[ni] --> [n'z'i] --> [z'i]  --> [z`1] --> [r\=]

--> [@r\] --> [ar\] --> [a]

'twas easier than I thought   :)

Ray.



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   XRICTOC ANECTH
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