zompist bboard

Thank you! This was the information I was looking for. They do say that this change may have happened earlier if my German is correct (wenn nicht frueher), so it could have happened before the change *z>R.
Anyway my other question remains, why did in English the change -eth>s occur?

I am trying to find out if this correlation is predicted by Optimality Theory. If a language has few phonemes this would mean according to OT that it has many markedness constraints forbidding certain phonemes dominating faithfulness constraints. If a language has a simple syllable structure it mean...

Did this leveling take place before or after the s or z changed into r? And if it took place before the change could it be aided by the fact that D and s (or z) are sounds that are pretty close?

If I am informed correctly the ending for 3rd person singular on a verb in proto-germanic was -D. How did that become -r in North-Germanic languages? Is it a result of a regular sound change? Or influence from the 2nd person singular? And is the Modern English -s related to it? I know that middle En...

Clicks can come from loans. They are not that common, I just did a count on the webpage of a Zulu newspaper and of the first 50 words 5 had clicks. It is not out of the ordinary to assume that 10% of the words of a language are loans. In addition to loans clicks may come from ideophones. Ideophones ...

One thing I really wonder is, how does a language build up new stop series? In particular, other than that stop~top example, is there another way to build, say, /t_h,t,d/ contrast from /t,d/? How zulu end up with /ph,p,b,b_</ from an original /p,b/? Let me try to answer the Zulu question. Keep in m...

It may have been mentioned in this thread before, I am too lazy to look it up, but I found a great resource:

Web resources for African Languages