Re: Dominus (Was: Re: Werewolf)

R A Brown skrev:
> Paul Bennett wrote:
>> There are lots of apparently nonsensical[*] sound changes and
>> alternations all over PIE,
>  > l/d, r/d, r/s, r/n, l/n,
There is nothing strange or random at all about these changes;
in fact in each pair the one can change into the other with
the loss or addition of a single feature, except for s > r
which is still quite natural if you consider the steps:
s > z > r\ > r.  Some dialects of modern Greek have /r/
corresponding to ancient Δ, which is still a one-feature
per step change whether it was directly [d] > [4] or it
was [D] > [r\] -- or even [D] > [4]!

> I do not see anything nonsensical about medial [r] becoming [l]. It is
> AFAIK not an uncommon change, nor is it confined to IE langs.
Indeed.  Moreover these changes tend to happen as remote assimilation
or dissimilation.

> [snip]
>> [*]By which I mean more or less regular, but not easily understood
>> without resorting to the "if /ni/ can become /a/" defense, which
>> verges on the Chewbaccan.
>
> But the point is that the change from archaic Chinese /ni/ to the modern
> Yangchow dialect /A/ was effected by a series of *regular* (not more or
> less, but precisely regular) sound changes. As Y.R. Chao pointed out
> (and I quote) "all the steps being reflected in other parallel changes,
> geographical as well as historical."
Notably it is not *a change* but *a series of changes*.
None of the individual changes is remarkable at all:

ni >  n\z\i > z\i >  z`i  > z`i\  >  r\=  >  @r\  >  Ar\  >  A

Where n\ transcribes Chao's symbol for alveopalatal nasal.

<digression>
Chao devised three symbols for alveopalatal stops and nasal,
which were not accepted by the IPA but are in Unicode's
Latin Extended B block as U+0221  U+0235 , U+0236.
I hereby motion that they be adopted into CXS as t\ d\ n\.
They may not be distinguished from /c/ etc. or /t_j/
etc. in any natlang, though Chao implies they are in
some form of Tibetan, but they probably are at least
important allophones in the Sohlob languages (my conlangs).
Anyway it does feel a bit daft to transcribe _nc, nj, ny_
as [Jts\ Jdz\ J] since this nasal phoneme is definitely
alveopalatal, while an actual mediopalatal nasal occurs
as an allophone of /N/.


> The point is that one cannot arbitrarily rule out a change of one set of
> sounds into another, without knowing the diachronic development of
> sounds in the related languages; I see nothing Chewbaccan in this. Thus,
> one cannot arbitrarily rule out the possibility that Latin -icella
> became -isoara in Romanian; one has to know how sounds developed from VL
> to modern Romanian.
>
Amen.

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