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In Yaur, an Austronesian language, we have the change *m,n > g/_r. (cf. Kamholz 2014)

Zaarin wrote:

Soap wrote:Still, isnt it true that the vowel of PULL in General American is truly [ə], or at least closer to [ə] than to [ʊ]? I've never heard a rounded vowel in that word as far as I know, nor have I heard a syllabic [l].

Speaking for my GenAm dialect, pull is definitely /pʰl̩/.

I don't believe you.

Do you know of any precedent for the change(s)?

I'm interested in whether a certain series of vowel changes seems like total baloney or not. Basically the way it starts is a > aə in open syllables or something, and then we get: aə > ɑɨ > ɔi Basically, the first element of the diphthong backs while the second element raises and fronts. Does this m...

Armenian /ʁ/ comes from a velarized l which was probably plain at some point in the past.

I don't know if either is attested, but we do have velars becoming alveolar liquids in some instances. Pohnpeian and a couple other Micronesian languages have the correspondence POc *ⁿg > PMic *x > r/_a, with *x probably being ɣ based on other correspondences. (it's not attested as a velar in any of...

A conlang that I may or may not actually do anything with. Bonus points if you recognize which language this is totally not a clone of /p t t͡s t͡ʃ t͡ʃʷ kʲ k͡ʟ̥ kʷ k͡ʟ̥ʷ q qʷ/ /b d gʲ gʷ ɢ ɢʷ/ /s ʃ ʟ̥ ʟ̥ʷ χ χʷ h/ /z ʒ ʒʷ ʁ ʁʷ/ /m n ŋ r w j/ /i e a o u ə/ + length phonemic on all except /ə/ some gibb...

It was just a way of tricking you into doing the research that I was too lazy to do myself

s > ɬ happens in an Athabaskan language (I can't remember which one, maybe Koyukon), along with ts > tɬ etc., and r > ɬ probably happened in Thao depending on how you want to reconstruct Proto Austronesian *R, e.g. *baqeRuh > faqɬu. r > ɬ definitely happened in Gedaged. From Proto-New Caledonia to P...

Why would you think they wouldn't be? The Cantonese is quite typical for Sinitic, the Monpa is quite typical Bodic; we have reconstructions in these and other parts of the family that seem to bridge the gap; numbers are fairly resistant to relexification. Because the word for 'one' in Written Tibet...

zompist wrote:Heck, while I'm on that page, there's Cantonese jɐt vs. Monpa t’i 'one'...

Is it certain that these are actually cognates?

No script "needs" a cursive style, but all scripts do have a variety of "cursive" scripts, because writing in print is annoying, slow, and pointless--characters can be interprable even if there is a startling level of difference between the "official" variant of the letter and the one that is used i...

A little bit of pedantry to start with, technically there's no historical evidence to ensure that the relevant set wasn't simply alveolar in Proto-Athabaskan and then later shifted to (inter)dental in Northern Athabaskan. p > kʷ is attested in several examples as an irregular change in Indo-European...

Chagen wrote:It is my birthday today. Yay. I am now 21 years old. I can drink beer now. Except I don't like alcohol so whatever.

That's what I said too until not too long ago

The conditioning environment for labiovelars or similar sounds in North Vanuatu is indeed the sound preceding /u o/ or following /u/. However, languages occasionally block the labial shift if the original vowels remain unchanged.

Strictly speaking that's barely even a "change". Depending on how you're using the symbol /ɣ/ it's at most a matter of tongue raising.

Never seen anybody crowdsource spurious etymological connections but I guess there's a first time for everything.

seems fine to me

1. We should at least define complexity if we're going to have a formal discussion about the topic here. We might just say "complexity" in a sound change is merely how many parameters are necessary to trigger it, with parameters being the presence of certain segments, or location in the word, or pre...

In fact if you look at a spectrogram, unaspirated stops do have a small puff after them, although it's obviously not as prominent as that of 'aspirated' stops.

Mike Yams wrote:Also, I was wondering about the diachronics of /tʳ/. Does anyone know how it might arise? For instance how it did in Fijian?

Fijian /ⁿdr/ is not an innovation really--it's a phoneme that existed all the way back in Proto-Oceanic. But to answer your question, it arises from the clusters *nd and *nr.

The Redwall series is an exemplar of good food descriptions--as a child (the intended reader demographic, I would say) I had no idea what a cordial was, but it didn't matter because the sensuous character of the description that Zaarin notes was very present. The fine details of what foods were pres...

if you want something that's natural to native english speakers then just don't indicate pitch accent in the orthography at all.

A labial consonant followed by w is the traditional way of indicating velarized labials in Oceanic scholarship. They aren't "labialized bilabials" proper.

No, Travis, the point is that the meaning of "we" is "me and others". Saying "we" should do something about so-and-so implies that "me" is in the people who "should do something about so-and-so" even though "me" is not a part of that group at all.