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Re: ontology of glottalized segments?

From:Thomas R. Wier <trwier@...>
Date:Friday, August 13, 2004, 13:00
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 :) ========================================================================= Thomas Wier "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally, Dept. of Linguistics because our secret police don't get it right University of Chicago half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of 1010 E. 59th Street Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter. Chicago, IL 60637