Sound Shifts

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.

So, i went back to thinking about previous things, such as {x} for /H/
(_hhet_), and i thought maybe i should change that.  So:

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?

I've also been thinking of possibly having the soundshifts [kw] >> [q]
and [gw] >> [q<vcd>], maybe only before back vowels.  I seem to remember
reading somewhere of another conlang whose conhistory has this kind of
shift.

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
would become *[kiw].... in Judean, this would make the endings [ol] and
[ul] turn into [ow] {o:} and [uw] {u:}, but when it's not part of those
long vowels, [w] turns into either [f] or [v].  So there would be:

al >> aw >> af
el >> ew >> ef
il >> iw >> if
ol >> ow >> {o:}
ul >> uw >> {u:}

Or maybe with 'long' A, E, and I, by comparison....

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.


-Stephen (Steg)
 _akh sa'esh azoi-thyut, ng''ezoi-gel a:sh-wa'tzrus, nga'saur ezu-elyeb
tzii liiyol uzu-chlus_

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