Re: Sound Shifts

At 7:40 pm -0400 19/4/99, Steg Belsky wrote:
>Hello,
>
>i was thinking today about the possible sound-shifts and orthography in
>Judean, and i realized that i had no way to represent the Hebrew _ttet_,
>which is some kind of pharyngealized or velar ("emphatic") /t/.  This
>would be needed in the word _gett_, "divorce", which i don't see why the
>Judeans wouldn't use the Hebrew word.
Nor do I.  It's quite likely that Hebrew sounds, unknown in Latin, would
get incorporated into the language.

[...]
>
>What do you think about the sound shift [ks] >> [t<k>], where <k> means
>'velarized'?  It would make the unusual orthography of using {x} for a
>form of [t], but i don't see anything wrong in the sound shift... the
>place of articulation slides forwards to the place of the [s], but it
>retains the stopness of the [k] and is 'colored' velar by the [k].
>Anyone see problems with this?
It's certainly an interesting shift  :)
It is unusual but arguably no more odd than the shift of /ks/ --> /ps/ we
come across in Romanian.

[snip]

>
>Two more things are R and L...i like the idea of [r] >> [l] and [l] >>
>[w] when at the end of a syllable, so *amar would become *amal and *cil
Certainly there are examples in Spanish where final -r has given way to -l;
the example that comes readily to mind in {pape'l} = 'paper'.

>would become *[kiw].... in Judean, this would make the endings [ol] and
>[ul] turn into [ow] {o:} and [uw] {u:},
That was normal in Old French   ;)

[....]
>
>Btw, just as a little anecdote, the reason i like the idea of /l/ >> /w/
>is because i have a habit of doing that myself, so for instance the most
>obvious example, i pronounce my last name "Belsky" more like [bEwski]
>than [bElski].  I think it's a "velarized" or "dark" L.
I shall that throughout today as I listen to my students from south-west
London  :)   Indeed, that change is characteristic of all London speech and
has pervaded much of the south east of England.  When I was young I
pronounced 'towel', 'tail' & 'tell' as homophones, namely: [tEw].

Ray.