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Flaidish question

Posted: Sat Dec 03, 2016 4:58 pm
by alice
Apologies if this as been asked before, but this is my first post in this forum...

I was thinking about this:
For both high vowels, the Flaidish rule is that the vowel acquired an initial glide of the opposite backness.
and was wondering what the phonetic motivation might be. Or, for that matter, the external (non-linguistic) motivation, i.e. "why you did it that way".

Re: Flaidish question

Posted: Sat Dec 03, 2016 5:36 pm
by zompist
The meta-conlinguistic explanation is given in the previous paragraph: it's how the English spelling system works for <u>: "long u" in "cute" > /ju/. If long i worked the same way, it'd've gone to /wi/.

A possible path for this might be [uu] > [yu] (rounding) > [ju] (fronting).

I'm not sure that this is any weirder than the actual GVS, where the initial vowel was lowered 2 or 3 steps!

Re: Flaidish question

Posted: Sun Dec 04, 2016 1:48 pm
by alice
If /ei/ > /oi/ > /wa/ in French (and something similar in Brythonic), then it's not too far from that to /ii/ >/wi/.