Sound Change Quickie Thread

[Travis B.]

Are these changes possible?

Reflexes:
/t͡ʃ d͡ʒ/ > /k g/ maybe before another velar, maybe also word-initially and word-finally

Coronal plosives seem to only change into velar plosives as part of a chainshift caused by the glottalization of /k/.

[Ahzoh]

Are these changes possible?

Reflexes:
/t͡ʃ d͡ʒ/ > /k g/ maybe before another velar, maybe also word-initially and word-finally

Coronal plosives seem to only change into velar plosives as part of a chainshift caused by the glottalization of /k/.

I knew it was a stretch but ya never know what crazy changes happen.

Right, I'll just have /ʃ ʒ t͡ʃ d͡ʒ/ > /ɬ l s z/ and call it a day.

Relatedly I'm thinking of having it so that the third-person verb suffixes are something like -su(n)/-si(n) while the third person possessive suffixes are -ku(n)/-ki(n) and I'm wondering what the independent pronouns would have to look like to have these reflexes.

[Vijay]

/ʃ/ > /ɬ/ (gains lateralization as a result of influence from preexisting /ɬ/)

This happened at least in Puxian Min (if not in some other Chinese/Sinitic varieties of southern China) where no lateral fricatives existed before.

/ʒ/ > /ɮ/ > /l/ (same as above)

Proto-Nguni seems to have had /ⁿd͡ʒ/ > /inɮ/, again where no lateral fricatives existed before, and Kabardian and Adyghe seem to have [ɮ] in free variation with [l], so I don't see why not.

/t͡ʃ d͡ʒ/ > /s z/ before another /s z/, maybe also intervocalically

In Tamil, [s] is apparently the prestigious phonetic realization of /t͡ʃ/ in most contexts (I'm not sure how to phrase it. For example, pronouncing Chennai as [ˈt͡ʃɛnnej], although technically correct, would apparently be associated with the speech of lower-caste speakers, whereas the prestigious (and thus increasingly common) way to pronounce it would be [ˈsɛnnej]). Marathi seems to have some alternation between [d͡ʒ] and [z] as well, and in Kashmiri and Assamese, for example, /d͡ʒ/ has changed to [z] in all contexts, IIUC.

[cedh]

Are these changes possible?

Reflexes:
/t͡ʃ d͡ʒ/ > /k g/ maybe before another velar, maybe also word-initially and word-finally

Coronal plosives seem to only change into velar plosives as part of a chainshift caused by the glottalization of /k/.

Some German dialects (in the region around Cologne) have undergone a shift of /n d t nd nt/ to /ŋ ɡ k ŋ(ɡ) ŋk/. For the NT clusters the change happened after stressed vowels of all qualities, for single consonants the change was conditioned by a preceding stressed long high vowel (which corresponds to a diphthong in Modern Standard German).

Some examples:

Colognian Zick /tsɪk/ 'time' < Middle High German zīt /tsiːt/ (cf. Modern Standard German) Zeit /tsaɪt/; cognate to English tide)
Col. schnigge /ʃnɪɡə/ 'to cut' < MHG snīden /sniːdən/ (cf. MSG schneiden /ʃnaɪdən/)
Col. hück /hʏk/ 'today' < MHG hiute /hyːtə/ (cf. MSG heute /hɔɪtə/)
Col. brung /bʁʊŋ/ 'brown' < MHG brūn /bruːn/ (cf. MSG braun /bʁaʊn/, cognate to English brown)
Col. hinger /hɪŋɐ/ 'behind' < MHG hinder /hindər/ (cf. MSG hinter /hɪntəʁ/)
Col. Engk /ɛŋk/ 'end' < MHG ende /endə/ (cf. MSG Ende /ɛndə/, cognate to English end)
Col. Hungk /hʊŋk/ 'dog' < MHG hunt /hunt/ (cf. MSG Hund /hʊnt/, cognate to English hound)

(These changes did not affect affricates though.)

[Ahzoh]

All right, well what about determining what the independent pronouns might be from the the verbal enclitics -su(n) and -si(n) (feminine and masculine respectively) and possessive enclitics -ku(n) and -ki(n) (feminine and masculine respectively)?

e.g.
yanúm-si "he summoned"
yanúm-sun "the women summoned"
and
ḫakár-ki "his dog"
ḫakrế-ki "his dogs"

[axolotl]

It seems like Faroese could take a similar analysis. For skerping, you have ɔu̯ ʉu̯ > ɛ ɪ before <gv>, so maybe these should be analyzed as /ɛw ɪw/ - and then you have ɛi̯ ʊi̯ ai̯ ɔi̯ > ɛ ʊ a ɔ before <ggj>, so maybe these should be analyzed as /ej uj aj oj/. But I'm not sure if this is a workable analysis; there may be reasons against it, and even if it works, it doesn't have the same benefit that it does in English, where it makes the vowel system a little more crosslinguistically reasonable, eliminates long vowels, and almost simplifies the phonotactics. (Unfortunately, it ends up prohibiting stressed open syllables with vowels other than /ɑ o ɚ/, and that's not a natural class at all. If you call /o/ a low vowel, which it phonetically is, that explains the cot-caught merger and lets you say stressed open syllables can only contain low vowels or /ɚ/, which is a little more reasonable. For maximal simplicity we'd also like to be able to get rid of /ɚ/, but there's no way to do that; it has to be a monophthong because it doesn't condition l-breaking.)

This is a spectacularly late reply, but I was reading through old posts and wanted to say that /ɚ/ does seem to cause l-breaking in my speech (pretty close to GenAm), just less obviously and less dramatically than closing diphthongs and high tense vowels. "girl" is something like [kɚᵊɫ], maybe, with a very small schwa in there.

[Nortaneous]

This is a spectacularly late reply, but I was reading through old posts and wanted to say that /ɚ/ does seem to cause l-breaking in my speech (pretty close to GenAm), just less obviously and less dramatically than closing diphthongs and high tense vowels. "girl" is something like [kɚᵊɫ], maybe, with a very small schwa in there.

For me, words like "ale", "eel", "aisle", and "oil" are clearly disyllabic, and sometime in grade school, I realized I pronounced "Carl" as a disyllable, and figured this couldn't be correct because it was spelled with one syllable. (I think I only noticed after I got Fire Emblem 7, which has a character named Karel.)

Is "girl" disyllabic for you?

In some cases, though, it's not clear whether a word is monosyllabic or disyllabic. Around here, that's the case for MOUTH + l. At one point I asked my mom (who takes some interest in US dialects) how many syllables were in some list of words (with unrelated ones as controls so it wasn't obvious what I was looking for), and those were the words she wasn't sure about.

I think I generally have monosyllables for such words, but disyllables in "owl" and "vowel", and "towel" can have either. Does anyone have a contrast between /æwl/ <owl>/<oul> and /æwəl/ <owel>? That is, are there people for whom "owl", "howl", "foul", "scowl" etc. are consistently monosyllabic, and "bowel", "towel", "trowel", "vowel" etc. are consistently disyllabic?

[Ahzoh]

How many sound changes you think would it take to produce this?:

Code: Select all

pVruḫ-    + rebim  > parāḫim
verb-stem + "man"  > CaCv̄C-

nVkiś-    + rebim  > nakāśim
verb-stem + "man"  > CaCv̄C-

mVǧad-    + rebim  > maǧādim
verb-stem + "man"  > CaCv̄C-

etc. etc.

[vorog]

Hello. I'm new here and to the world of conlanging at large. I just created the phonemic inventory for my conlang Odnala, but now I'm stuck because I have no idea how to create a convincing set of allophones (keep in mind that I'm aiming for naturalism). Have linguists individuated some cross-linguistic laws for allophonic variation, something like Greenberg's linguistic universals but for allophony that I could use as a template?

[bradrn]

Hello. I'm new here and to the world of conlanging at large. I just created the phonemic inventory for my conlang Odnala, but now I'm stuck because I have no idea how to create a convincing set of allophones (keep in mind that I'm aiming for naturalism). Have linguists individuated some cross-linguistic laws for allophonic variation, something like Greenberg's linguistic universals but for allophony that I could use as a template?

Greetings vorog! Have some pickles and tea:



(I don’t know why, but it’s a board tradition to offer new users pickles and tea.)

Anyway: honestly, at this point, I wouldn’t worry too much about allophones. For now, I’d just focus on making an outline for the main parts of your language — you can always come back later and fill in details such as allophony. But, assuming you are already at that point, I don’t know of any hard-and-fast rules; there’s really no way to do it other than by thinking about which sounds are similar to each other and what plausible sound changes you can use to move between them. If you do want some resources however, you might find Annis’s Patterns of Allophony useful.

[vorog]

Hello. I'm new here and to the world of conlanging at large. I just created the phonemic inventory for my conlang Odnala, but now I'm stuck because I have no idea how to create a convincing set of allophones (keep in mind that I'm aiming for naturalism). Have linguists individuated some cross-linguistic laws for allophonic variation, something like Greenberg's linguistic universals but for allophony that I could use as a template?

Greetings vorog! Have some pickles and tea:



(I don’t know why, but it’s a board tradition to offer new users pickles and tea.)

Anyway: honestly, at this point, I wouldn’t worry too much about allophones. For now, I’d just focus on making an outline for the main parts of your language — you can always come back later and fill in details such as allophony. But, assuming you are already at that point, I don’t know of any hard-and-fast rules; there’s really no way to do it other than by thinking about which sounds are similar to each other and what plausible sound changes you can use to move between them. If you do want some resources however, you might find Annis’s Patterns of Allophony useful.

Thanks

[Ahzoh]

I have this set of pronouns:


I want to add some obviative pronouns, which are derived from a combination of the distal determiner and the third person pronouns (a "that he/her" construction) so the end result is liʔkī/liʔkū (nominative), liʔkā (oblique). The question is, how do I do I phonetically reduce them so they become possessive suffixes?
I don't want to just... tack them on and call it a day. Don't really want it to just be -l(i)ki/-l(i)ku,-l(i)ka either, although if that's the best I can get, I guess it can't be helped.

[Vilike]

I have a conlang with obviative pronouns and possessive suffixes, where obviation is simply not distinguished on the latter.
You could also use another strategy whereby you forego the possessive suffix and only use a distal demonstrative with the noun, or even grammaticalise another thing into an obviative possessive suffix, like "other".

[Ahzoh]

Is it attested to have only obviative pronouns but no associated morphology (possessive suffixes, verb agreement markers, etc.) if the language has them?

Well, I still think it would be cool to have them

EDIT: Hmm, I've thought about just -li/-lu but I already have the definite article -li (also derived from the distal determiner) and i feel like that's too many things derived from the lV monosyllable

Maybe -līya/-lūwa and (for obviative verb markers -tiya/tuwa/siya/suwa)

[dɮ the phoneme]

What are some examples of weight sensitive stress systems losing their weight sensitivity, with stress becoming regularized on a particular syllable? I have a weight sensitive trochaic system that puts stress on the penult most of the time, and I'd like to do some stress-based vowel changes and then make them phobic by regularizing stress to the penult across the board.

[Nortaneous]

What are some examples of weight sensitive stress systems losing their weight sensitivity, with stress becoming regularized on a particular syllable? I have a weight sensitive trochaic system that puts stress on the penult most of the time, and I'd like to do some stress-based vowel changes and then make them phobic by regularizing stress to the penult across the board.

French?

[bradrn]

What are some examples of weight sensitive stress systems losing their weight sensitivity, with stress becoming regularized on a particular syllable? I have a weight sensitive trochaic system that puts stress on the penult most of the time, and I'd like to do some stress-based vowel changes and then make them phobic by regularizing stress to the penult across the board.

French?

That’s what I immediately thought of as well.

[dɮ the phoneme]

What are some examples of weight sensitive stress systems losing their weight sensitivity, with stress becoming regularized on a particular syllable? I have a weight sensitive trochaic system that puts stress on the penult most of the time, and I'd like to do some stress-based vowel changes and then make them phobic by regularizing stress to the penult across the board.

French?

I guess I should have clarified: I mean a stress shift without an associated change in the segmental structure. In French, stress didn't so much shift to the final syllable as all segmental material after stress was lost.

[Vilike]

Common Slavic stress wasn't weight-based, more lexical, but it was nevertheless regularized in the penult in Polish and the initial in Czech. For the latter it may be from Germanic influence.

[Ahzoh]

I have these syllable types (# = word boundary):
L = light (#V, CV) syllable
H = heavy (#VV, #VC, CVV or CVC) syllable
S = superheavy (#VVC, CVVC) syllable

I decided to come up with sound change:
LSL > HHL
It isn't that superheavies aren't allowed in words, just that it somehow feels more natural/flowy to turn ma-lā́n-na into mā-lán-na, especially when the two syllables are stressed in the same place anyways.

I like to call such a situation as this as "weight offloading" and I'm wondering if this kind of thing is attested and what other situations where similar "offloading" might occur.