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Re: partial letter replacement in languages?

From:Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>
Date:Thursday, December 9, 2004, 9:25
On Thu, 9 Dec 2004 02:48:04 +0200, Rodlox <Rodlox@...> wrote:
> > is there a term for when a language is evolving/being changed, & replaces > one letter with another (ie, /d/ becomes /t/) in nearly all instances...yet > there are still words in the resultant language which retain (to continue > the example) /d/ ?
I don't know a term for it, but just wanted to note that some instances of this come when there are two (nearly) concurrent sound changes such that, say, /d/ becomes /t/ while, say, /D/ becomes /d/ -- so all or most original /d/'s disappeared but there are still /d/'s in the resulting language that used to be a different sound. (Perhaps Greek is an example, where /b/ -> /v/, but modern Greek has a /b/ phoneme which comes from, I assume, earlier /mp/ -- it's certainly written |mp|.) Cheers, -- Philip Newton <philip.newton@...> Watch the Reply-To!

Replies

Roger Mills <rfmilly@...>
Ray Brown <ray.brown@...>