Sound Change Quickie Thread

[akam chinjir]

those make perfect sense. Is your r like the English r, German, or something else? I think this would work best with a sound that s already liquid...Spanish R's would need to change to a liquid before they could start the change.

Great---thanks!

---Dumb of me not to have said anything about which /r/ I had in mind. For that language I've been assuming as alveolar approximant, but in fact it can be anything, since the fixed point is the daughter. (I actually settled on /r/ by trying to solve the equations aX→ai and uX→au for X.)

[Pabappa]

Actually even a regular alveolar flap might work, as long as there's *something * there that affects the vowel quaity, perhaps by lengthening. aX uX ----> ai au isnt that different from English's Great Vowel Shift, after all, where the determining factor was length.

[akam chinjir]

Ah, great. Thanks!

[Knit Tie]

I'm looking to shift a stress accent to a pitch accent in a phonology that has a pharyngealised series that it gets rid of by depharyngealisation rather fast and I'd like to do something interesting with the stress so that it distinguishes between the obligatory verb markers and regular clitics. Noun and verb compounding is everywhere, so there's that. I'd also like the accent to be syllable weight dependent, specifically falling on the rightmost heaviest syllable, with syllables being light (CV), heavy (CV: or CVC) or superheavy (CV:C). Any advice?

[mèþru]

I recommend starting with shifting stress to a weight-based system. You can then make pharyngealisation cause low tone syllables. Then get rid of tone distinctions outside of stressed syllables, thus replacing stress with a syllable weighted pitch accent.

[dɮ the phoneme]

How realistic is spreading of rounding from back-rounded vowels to the preceding syllable as a method of deriving front-rounded vowels? i.e. something like i e a > y ø ɔ /_(C){u o}. Would this be likely to be blocked by an intervening palatal glide?

[KathTheDragon]

Very realistic - it happened in Old Norse u-mutation.

[Xwtek]

Is it possible that word internal unstressed vowel is reduced more than those that are word finally?

[Pabappa]

Yes definitely, e.g. Deborah > Debra, not *Debor.

[Nortaneous]

Is it possible that word internal unstressed vowel is reduced more than those that are word finally?

yes

look into Latin vowel reduction - I forget the details but I think this happened there

(and then the reduced vowels were shoehorned back into the five-vowel system and Latin became syllable-timed)

[bbbosborne]

what sound changes can get me a bilabial trill?

[bradrn]

what sound changes can get me a bilabial trill?

The Index Diachronica lists mb → ʙ from Nias under 'Most Wanted Sound Changes'.

[Nortaneous]

what sound changes can get me a bilabial trill?

mp or mb > mʙ / _u is AFAIK the only way to get it in Austronesian languages other than Nias (where there was apparently no such conditioning factor) - sometimes there's also p > ʙ̥ / _u, as in Avava and Neverver, or p > ʙ / _u, as in Port Sandwich.

There's also b > ʙ / _o in Piraha, but Piraha has a vowel system of /a i o/.

Wikipedia claims that some languages of China have syllabic bilabial trills as allophones of /u/ or /ə/ after labial or alveolar plosives, but my guess is that these vowels either are or were at one point fricated.

[mae]

-

[Whimemsz]

Well for one thing, Everett wasn't the first linguist to work on or write about Piraha, so he came to the task with an inherited transcriptional tradition (although his differing analyses of various aspects of the phonology led him to change some of those). Arlo Heinrichs in 1964 wrote the vowel as <o>. But also, I don't think that's true. Everett* states that "o is realized as a high close back rounded [u] after h or k or preceding i. Elsewhere, it is a mid close back rounded." And in this video you can hear that the most common realizations are indeed [o] (and less commonly [ʊ]~[u], and though I didn't spend a huge amount of time trying to figure out if the environments matched those given by Everett it seems like they did) (and apparently usually nasalized after /h/ and /ʔ/, which applies to any vowel).


*In Handbook of Amazonian Languages, vol. I, ed. Desmond C. Derbyshire and Geoffrey K. Pullum, pg. 316

[Ahzoh]

Sort of related to the nature of this thread:

I can't find the ZBB thread wherein people discuss how i > k and u > p in some coda environment. Does anybody know where it is?

[cedh]

Sort of related to the nature of this thread:

I can't find the ZBB thread wherein people discuss how i > k and u > p in some coda environment. Does anybody know where it is?

I don't know where to find that thread, but here's a paper talking about such a type of sound change, although it lists /k/ as the outcome of both *i and *u / _#.

[akam chinjir]

That was a fun paper!

...In other news, I have t and d palatalising before i both initially and after a vowel. (They go to c and ɟ, if it matters.) Intervocally you also get geminate t and [nd] or [ⁿd], which may represent geminate d. Any idea whether these are likely to palatalise as well?

[Whimemsz]

Sort of related to the nature of this thread:

I can't find the ZBB thread wherein people discuss how i > k and u > p in some coda environment. Does anybody know where it is?

I don't know where to find that thread, but here's a paper talking about such a type of sound change, although it lists /k/ as the outcome of both *i and *u / _#.

The same or similar changes also happened in some other languages not mentioned in that paper; a later one by the same author gives some other examples from some Grasslands Bantu languages, Danish, and others. Blust (in The Austronesian Languages) also implies that Singhi (Singai) is not the only Land Dayak language/dialect to have obstruent epenthesis after final high vowels (pg. 636), but he doesn't give any examples of other cases. From VERY briefly skimming this book it looks like it holds for the Biatah, Bistaang, Pinyawa', and Bengoh dialects/languages, and for some speakers of Serambu, Benuk, and Sapug (pp. 167-168). Although the authors of that book seem to consider the final consonant after their -/ə/ (Blust's Singhi -/u/) to be /h/ = [h] in all dialects so I don't know in which varieties it's actually realized as [x], if any.

The ZBB thread where this change was discussed, incidentally, was the Bizarre Sound Changes thread. Relevant posts are this one and those following. (There's also a post there mentioning the Faroese epenthesis of glides after final high vowels, which underwent subsequent fortition to [ttʃ] and [kf]: here.)

[Ahzoh]

So, it's a form of epenthesis? Not a replacement/transformation? And I can't find the part about u becoming p in this similar manner, but I know I saw it in relation to this.