Re: ontology of glottalized segments?

From:    Paul Roser <pkroser@...>
> I paged through Fallon's book on ejectives, but he doesn't really
> speculate on how they might have arisen in most languages - the one
> that he does, Yapese, one of only two Austronesian lgs to have
> ejectives, got them from vowel loss:
>
> CV? -> C? ~ C'
Interesting.  I'd already been planning on having a four vowel
system in Proto-Phaleran (i, a, u, @). Schwa gets deleted
everywhere, except in some cases word-finally whose details I
have yet to work out.  This has huge implications for the language,
because ProtoP *q shifts to glottal stop in coda position, and
later and the glottal stop itself is later lost in all positions,
sometimes leading to compensatory lengthening.  Thus a form like
ProtoPhal *d@qw@nnu can become ModPhal /t'unu/ quite easily.
Glad to have some of my thinking reinforced by natlang examples :)

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Thomas Wier	       "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
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