Re: [PEER REVIEW] Mutations and sound changes (longish)

En réponse à Peter Clark <peter-clark@...>:

>         Well, I've thought a little more about it and decided that
> Proto-Enamyn did
> have approximants after all. (They were just hiding in the corner.)
> This
> simplifies matters somewhat without adding too much work. All I need to
> do is
> figure out how lenition would affect /w r\ j/, if at all. Suggestions?
>
Not affected, or just disappear. Since approximants are the most 'lenited'
consonants you can find, it just makes sense that lenition wouldn't affect them
any longer, or that it would make them disappear entirely.

>         Nasalizing turned voiced unvoiced stops, nasalized voiced stops,
> and turned
> fricatives into stops.
>         For Aspiration/Hardening, whatever triggered the change turned
> aspirated
> stops into fricatives, while voicing unaspirated stops, denasalizing
> nasals,
> and hardening fricatives. Might this require a previous merger of
> another two
> systems? Gah...
Hehe, no need to explain everything :)) . Your academicians may not know
everything about Proto-Enamyn ;))) .

>         Where the back stops and nasals follow nasalization, while the
> front stops
> and nasals follow hardening. What say ye?
>
Nice! It looks OK to me ;)) .

>         Actually, palatization is lost just before "modern" Enamyn--see
> my first
> post.
>
True, I forgot that. So in the same way, you could have plenty of glides
disappearing, some creating diphtongues, while others would just vanish,
creating hiatus which would then again be resolved by diphtongues (and if you
get too many diphtongues, nothing prevents you from simplifying them later,
like it happened in Middle French).

>         I thought I remembered seeing this before...hmm...I will need to
> think about
> this some. I've also got to explain the presence of /tS/ as well...
Maybe from original /tj/ cluster (whatever the origin of /j/ here), and/or
from /t/ or /c/, especially in front of front vowels (you could have your
palatal series change differently depending on the following vowel. For
instance, /c/ could become /kj/ before a back vowel but /tS/ before a high
front vowel, and if you order this change before the vowel changes, you could
even say that /1/ was considered a front vowel, along with /i/ and /e/, but /&/
was not, and you'd end up after vowel changes with some /M/ and /E/ preceeded
with /kj/ while others are preceeded with /tS/! The pattern seems to have
disappeared in this way!!! This way, you could also get a /dz/ from /J\/ in
front of high front vowels (with a /dZ/ step in between). Your /z/ could then
merge with /dz/ - as I said, hardening is rare without a reason, but if the
affricate is already there, it can happen - and then become /ts/. So there, a
perfectly good explanation for the presence of /tS/ and /ts/, which also brings
something nice: depending on whether your /ts/ comes from an ancestral /z/
or /J\/, it would have different mutations!!!).

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

Take your life as a movie: do not let anybody else play the leading role.

Reply