En réponse à Nik Taylor <yonjuuni@...>:
>
> Japanese merged /Z/ and /dZ/ into /dZ/, and merged /z/ and /dz/ into
> what I think is /dz/, but most sources say is /z/ (it sounds like an
> affricate to me sometimes, maybe free variation?)
>
Free variation as far as I know. I definitely hear both in the anime I watch,
and my Japanese teacher had both in free variation (with a small tendency to
have [dz] at the beginning of a word and [z] elsewhere).
> I seem to remember that some New Guinea languages are reconstructed
> with
> a /s/ -> /t/ change.
>
Now that's a strange one!
Christophe.
http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr
Take your life as a movie: do not let anybody else play the leading role.