Sound Change Quickie Thread

[Qwynegold]

Similar question with no answers.

How would Mthaduri borrow something like [aja]? I don't want it to be a'i'a with three consecutive glottal stops, and asha seems too distant.

I’m borrowing foreign [w] as /b/, and [j] usually as a glottal stop when adjacent to something that would be borrowed as /i/. I’m not sure how [aja] or [uja] sequences can be borrowed into Mthaduri.

How about j l or ɾ?

[Cael]

How realistic is for stops to lenient in unstressed syllables but remain the same in stressed syllables? In other words is it possible for /ˈpa.pa/ > /ˈpa.fa/ and /pa.ˈpa/ > /fa.ˈpa/?

[Whimemsz]

I certainly think you can get away with that. (Just look at English, which aspirates stops which are the onsets of stressed syllables, but not onsets of unstressed syllables -- you could copy English, then have aspirates become geminates and then have a chain shift of geminate > plain > fricative. Or you could just have onsets geminate with no intermediate step. Or you could just ignore any intermediate steps and I think it would still be plausible.)

[Pogostick Man]

Given a language with a plosive inventory *p *b *t *d *k *g *q *ɢ *ʔ, how plausible is it for the following to occur:

l > ɬ following a voiceless stop
tɬ kɬ qɬ ʔɬ > t͜ɬ k͜x q͡χ ɬ (there would probably be another alveolar affricate present already; if not, t͜ɬ'd probably turn into a non-lateral affricate)
{g,ɢ}l > ʟ? (> w?)
tʔ kʔ qʔ > tʼ kʼ qʼ
qʼ > ʔ
ɢ might go away somewhere, possibly to ʕ or ɴ

?

[sangi39]

l > ɬ following a voiceless stop

Seems fair enough

tʔ kʔ qʔ > tʼ kʼ qʼ

I think this has been mentioned a few times on the board as plausible.

qʼ > ʔ

[ʔ] appears as an allophone of /q'/ in Ubykh so why not?

As for the rest, I'll leave that to someone else.

[Nortaneous]

{g,ɢ}l > ʟ? (> w?)

Hiw had r > gʟ > ɣ, so ʟ > ɣ is another possibility, although it could turn into w also.

ɢ might go away somewhere, possibly to ʕ or ɴ

Spontaneous nasalization would be weird, especially since contrastive uvular nasals are very rare. ʕ is plausible, maybe with ʁ as an intermediary.

[Tropylium]

I have a question along a similar line of thought to the previous question.

Is it possible for a difference in +RTR vs. -RTR to "bleed" backwards onto the preceding consonant?

This happened in Mongolian, though only for the velars (which became uvulars before +RTR vowels).

Adding in changes like *tˤ → ʈ does not seem like too much of a stretch to assume.

[zyxw59]

what can you do with implosives? some ideas i've had are:
/ɓ ɗ ɠ/ → /mb nd ŋɡ/
/ɓ ɗ ɠ/ → /b d ɡ/ (accompanied by /b d ɡ/ → /β ð ɣ/)
are these plausible?

[Pole, the]

The latter is ok. The former I'm not sure about, although I wouldn't be surprised if I found a similar change in a natlang.

[Click]

Are these sound changes plausible?

• ʧ ʃ → ʦ s
  ʦ → ss
  ss → ˀs
  ˀs → z

[Cedh]

Are these sound changes plausible?

• ʧ ʃ → ʦ s
  ʦ → ss
  ss → ˀs
  ˀs → z

Yes. Although [ʦ] → [ˀs] is even more plausible without an intermediate [ss] stage.

[Click]

Thanks!

[Genome]

I was wondering how plausible it would be for these sound changes to happen within 1,000 years:

ɸ x when preceding an diphthong.
ʔ q
u y
æ aʊ when following a non-sibilant fricative.
ʊ o
t d unless it is between vowels.
kʷ ɡʷ
ɡʷ q

[Drydic]

They're perfectly plausible. Them also not happening at all is also perfectly plausible.

[Click]

I was wondering how plausible it would be for these sound changes to happen within 1,000 years:

ɸ x when preceding an dipthong diphthong.
ʔ q
u y
æ aʊ when following a non-silibant sibilant fricative.
ʊ o
t d unless it is between vowels.
kʷ ɡʷ
ɡʷ q

These sound changes are in my opinion too little for 1000 years.

ʔ → q is pretty much the opposite of what I'd expect, but it doesn't seem too far-fetched to me.
If I recall correctly, u → y happened in Ancient Greek. Moreover, the resulting y reverted back to u in Tsakonian Greek.
ʊ → o is plausible.
t → d unless between vowels is pretty much the opposite of what happens in real world. Perhaps you could pull it off by t → d between vowels followed by a voicing shift, but as far as I know that kind of shift affects all stops (e.g. Eastern Armenian vs. Western Armenian).
kʷ → gʷ fits well alongside with the voicing shift I proposed.
gʷ → q might work, probably via an intermediate ɢ, which devoices because uvulars are generally hard to voice. Does kʷ → gʷ feed into qʷ → q, so all instances of kʷ become q?

ɸ → x and æ → aʊ in said enviroments look random to me. Could you make these changes unconditional, perhaps?

EDIT: Ninjaed by Drydic.

[Drydic]

I was wondering how plausible it would be for these sound changes to happen within 1,000 years:

ɸ x when preceding an dipthong diphthong.
ʔ q
u y
æ aʊ when following a non-silibant sibilant fricative.
ʊ o
t d unless it is between vowels.
kʷ ɡʷ
ɡʷ q

These sound changes are in my opinion too little for 1000 years.

I don't think this is all the changes for the language, honestly.

If I recall correctly, u → y happened in Ancient Greek. Moreover, the resulting y reverted back to u in Tsakonian Greek.

Or it never shifted in Doric the first place. Last time we had this argument, the only evidence that was put forward for it having done so was Koine Greek having /y/. But Tsakonian (which is, via l > ts, Laconian, aka Spartan and thus the epitome of Doric) is only still around because its speakers never L1 shifted to Koine.

ɸ → x and æ → aʊ in said enviroments look random to me. Could you make these changes unconditional, perhaps?

or even more conditional; ɸ → x before a certain subset of diphthongs, æ → aʊ following labial and labialized fricatives, say like ɸ, f, ʃʷ, xʷ, hʷ you get the idea.

[Click]

I was wondering how plausible it would be for these sound changes to happen within 1,000 years:

ɸ x when preceding an dipthong diphthong.
ʔ q
u y
æ aʊ when following a non-silibant sibilant fricative.
ʊ o
t d unless it is between vowels.
kʷ ɡʷ
ɡʷ q

These sound changes are in my opinion too little for 1000 years.

I don't think this is all the changes for the language, honestly.

Thanks.

If I recall correctly, u → y happened in Ancient Greek. Moreover, the resulting y reverted back to u in Tsakonian Greek.

Or it never shifted in Doric the first place. Last time we had this argument, the only evidence that was put forward for it having done so was Koine Greek having /y/. But Tsakonian (which is, via l > ts, Laconian, aka Spartan and thus the epitome of Doric) is only still around because its speakers never L1 shifted to Koine.

I was going by this on Tsakonian, but your post makes a good point.

[Drydic]

I can't provide any source at the moment unfortunately, but I do distinctly recall that Doric of old was the only Greek dialect to not shift *u > y. Or maybe it and Achaean.

[Genome]

Here is my retry for the sound changes.
ɸ x
q ʔ
u y
æ aʊ following labial fricatives.
ʊ o
t d unless it is between vowels, following vowels shift from o u, y ɛ, and w i.
kʷ ɡʷ
ɡʷ ɢ
ɢ q
ʒ ∫
ŋ n

[WeepingElf]

If /u/ goes to /y/, I'd rather expect /ʊ/ to go to /u/.

[Tropylium]

Usually the follow-up to u > y is rather o > u. If there's an /ʊ/ around, it may not be necessary to introduce a new /u/ at all. IIRC there's a variety of Mongolic that has /y ʊ/ without /u/. (Of course, that's an [+RTR] sort of /ʊ/, not the lax one.)

o y w > u ɛ i / d_ looks completely aimless though.

[Dē Graut Bʉr]

Does ʟ ɰ x make sense?

[Click]

Yes.

[sangi39]

Just having a quick thought, but does:

[b d ɟ g] > [ɓ ɗ ʄ ɠ] > [p' t' c' k']

... make sense?

I'm basically trying to add glottalised consonants to a language without changing the overall syllable structure.

Also, the glottalic version of PIE has a rule against two glottalic consonants in the same root so my thinking in more specific terms was something like:

[dog] > [ɗoɠ] > [t'ok'] > [t'ok]
[mog] > [moɠ] > [mok'] > [mok']

To add more than just glottalised plosives, would [mok'] > [m'ok] be possible, with the glottalisation moving from the coda to the onset?

[Basilius]

Just having a quick thought, but does:

[b d ɟ g] > [ɓ ɗ ʄ ɠ] > [p' t' c' k'] > [p̰ t̰ c̰ k̰]

... make sense?

Maybe not, if taken as is (the first two steps would look more natural if turned in the opposite direction).

However, it may depend on what other series the language had. I can imagine a contrast reshaping going like this:

voiced+breathy :: plain voiced -> voiced+breathy :: voiced+creaky -> plain voiced :: voiced+creaky -> plain voiced :: ejective.