Sound Change Quickie Thread

[احمکي ارش-ھجن]

What environments can allow for a vowel to have a higher tone than normal, allophonically-speaking?

[Pogostick Man]

What environments can allow for a vowel to have a higher tone than normal, allophonically-speaking?

If it's following a voiceless or aspirated consonant, or if the vowel is long, high tone seems plausible given what I know.

[احمکي ارش-ھجن]

What environments can allow for a vowel to have a higher tone than normal, allophonically-speaking?

If it's following a voiceless or aspirated consonant, or if the vowel is long, high tone seems plausible given what I know.

My conlang doesn't have phonemic aspiration or vowel length, so I guess maybe voiceless...

[8Deer]

Glottalic codas caused low tone in some Proto-Athabaskan dialects and high tone in others, so that could be another possiblity.

[Pogostick Man]

Where would a nasal be most likely to fortite to a plosive, and where in relation to the stress would it be most likely to do this?

[vokzhen]

What environments can allow for a vowel to have a higher tone than normal, allophonically-speaking?

If it's following a voiceless or aspirated consonant, or if the vowel is long, high tone seems plausible given what I know.

Actually, I believe it's actually an opposite process: voiced obstruents affect a low tone, and then by default voiceless and aspirated ones gain a high tone to maintain contrast. But I don't believe they spontaneously gain high tone without something else being the trigger. Breathiness on a vowel can do the same thing, make the vowel low-tone and end up assigning other syllables to high tone.
Remnants of old stress can, I know Ingush (maybe Chechen too? I don't recall) has some affixes that were formerly stressed, but stress moved to word-initial and the affixes still carry the high tone of stress without the loudness.
You could probably also do something with syllable deletion a la Swedish or Franconian, where presence of a lost syllable inflicts a tone on the previous syllable due to the prosody of two-syllable versus one-syllable words. But it'd probably be rough to pull off if you're working with a language that has many affixes per word, and it would likely by phonetically a contour (falling, rising-falling) even if the height what's phonemically important.

Where would a nasal be most likely to fortite to a plosive, and where in relation to the stress would it be most likely to do this?

Probably initially or finally. Especially to fill in a gap, Korean "voiced" stops are aspirated initially, then nasal > voiced, and I want to say in some Southeast Asian languages the regular stops were unreleased and then nasals devoiced to reintroduce them. Medial or final nasals can prestop and then become fully stopped, though I might expect laterals to go along with it as well. And in English you've got fence [fɛnts] and dreamt [drɛmpt] and strength [strɛŋkθ], where voicing cuts off before the fricative is articulated. I expect in the next few hundred years the nasals will progress from stops to nasal vowels to nothing at all, and we'll be left with just [fɛts] and [strɛkθ], and whatever weird things the vowels end up doing when they nasalize.

[احمکي ارش-ھجن]

What environments can allow for a vowel to have a higher tone than normal, allophonically-speaking?

If it's following a voiceless or aspirated consonant, or if the vowel is long, high tone seems plausible given what I know.

Actually, I believe it's actually an opposite process: voiced obstruents affect a low tone, and then by default voiceless and aspirated ones gain a high tone to maintain contrast. But I don't believe they spontaneously gain high tone without something else being the trigger. Breathiness on a vowel can do the same thing, make the vowel low-tone and end up assigning other syllables to high tone.
Remnants of old stress can, I know Ingush (maybe Chechen too? I don't recall) has some affixes that were formerly stressed, but stress moved to word-initial and the affixes still carry the high tone of stress without the loudness.
You could probably also do something with syllable deletion a la Swedish or Franconian, where presence of a lost syllable inflicts a tone on the previous syllable due to the prosody of two-syllable versus one-syllable words. But it'd probably be rough to pull off if you're working with a language that has many affixes per word, and it would likely by phonetically a contour (falling, rising-falling) even if the height what's phonemically important.

Well my language is a triconsonantal root language so perhaps all that vowel syncope and thus syllable deletion may cause higher tone?

[Zaarin]

What environments can allow for a vowel to have a higher tone than normal, allophonically-speaking?

If it's following a voiceless or aspirated consonant, or if the vowel is long, high tone seems plausible given what I know.

Actually, I believe it's actually an opposite process: voiced obstruents affect a low tone, and then by default voiceless and aspirated ones gain a high tone to maintain contrast. But I don't believe they spontaneously gain high tone without something else being the trigger. Breathiness on a vowel can do the same thing, make the vowel low-tone and end up assigning other syllables to high tone.
Remnants of old stress can, I know Ingush (maybe Chechen too? I don't recall) has some affixes that were formerly stressed, but stress moved to word-initial and the affixes still carry the high tone of stress without the loudness.
You could probably also do something with syllable deletion a la Swedish or Franconian, where presence of a lost syllable inflicts a tone on the previous syllable due to the prosody of two-syllable versus one-syllable words. But it'd probably be rough to pull off if you're working with a language that has many affixes per word, and it would likely by phonetically a contour (falling, rising-falling) even if the height what's phonemically important.

Well my language is a triconsonantal root language so perhaps all that vowel syncope and thus syllable deletion may cause higher tone?

It hasn't with the Semitic languages, but you might check out their Chadic and Omotic cousins.

[StrangerCoug]

Is vowel rounding after labials attested?

[vokzhen]

I'm not sure it's happened consistently, but it's definitely happened. That's one of the sources for /y/ in German, for example, but not a regular one. If a language doesn't have consistently rounded back phonemes, I could absolutely see it causing a rounded/unrounded split. It wouldn't shock me to have it as a regular sound change elsewhere either, I just don't have any examples on hand.

[Nannalu]

I've recently come up with a phonology for an isolating lang I'm working on and it consists of only nasals and plosives. It may not be the most 'plausible' thing so how can I add some allophonic fricatives and/or approximants?

Initial:
/p t k q ʔ/
/pʰ tʰ kʰ qʰ/
/m n ɲ ŋ/

Final:
/p t k q ʔ/
/m n ŋ/

/i ə a ɯ u o/
/i˦ ə˦ a˦ ɯ˦ u˦ o˦/
/i˨ ə˨ a˨ ɯ˨ u˨ o˨/
/ĩ ə̃ ã ɯ̃ ũ õ/
/ĩ˦ ə̃˦ ã˦ ɯ̃˦ ũ˦ õ˦/
/ĩ˨ ə̃˨ ã˨ ɯ̃˨ ũ˨ õ˨/

EDIT: I realised this was a bit of a 'here do my work' kind of question so I've had a think.. would /ʔ/ > [h] before mid and low front vowels sound good? And labialisation could occur before /o/ (and variants): ʔʷ w /_o ??

[Hallow XIII]

Not having fricatives is a thing (mostly in Australia and southern India but still)!

[Nannalu]

Not having fricatives is a thing (mostly in Australia and southern India but still)!

Oh thank god! I didn't wanna get eaten alive out there by the people who get defensive about symmetry!

[vokzhen]

Both Australian and Dravidian languages tend to have /j w/ and an above-average number of liquids, though (four or five).

I'd say your easiest way is intervocal lenition, provided "isolating" doesn't also mean monosyllabic. /p t k (q)/ between vowels become [β/w ð/ɹ/l ɣ/j/w ʁ], /pʰ tʰ kʰ qʰ/ become [ɸ θ/s x χ]. Nasals in some positions becoming nasalized approximants, or even denasalizing and kicking out a nasal vowel is a possibility (i.e. some [ã] are /ã/ and some are [ãj] from /aɲ/). This might leave the no-continuant analysis as rather theoretical, though; [j] may only exist after nasal vowels, and alternate with /ɲ/ in compounds or something, but it would also be possibly to argue in practical terms /j/ exists but only in restricted (though perhaps common) contexts.

[Dē Graut Bʉr]

How stable is /z/ as the only voiced fricative?

[vokzhen]

Might depend a bit on what other fricatives you have, but I wouldn't give it a second thought. If you haven't come up with diachronics yet, especially so if you've got a two-way voiced-voiceless distinction in stops and an unpaired /ts/, i.e. old *dz deaffricated.

[Qwynegold]

I get too many ideas lately. Now I want to turn Swedish into a Northwest Caucasianesque language. There are two processes in this language that I want to ask about. One is vowels dumping their features on preceding consonants, and one is something similar to stød in Danish, except here the pitch accent turns into pharyngealization of consonants.

• What should I do about labiovelarized and labiopalatalized labials, which I find awkward? They are /m_w, p_w, b_w, f_w, v_w, m_H, p_H, b_H, f_H, v_H + pharyngealized variants of all these/ (_H here stands for labiopalatalization, which there doesn't seem to be a way of writing in X-SAMPA). I could do /f_w, v_w, f_H, v_H/ /p\, B, p\_j, B_j/, but what about the rest? Or should I just leave them all as is? Or just drop the rounding?
• What should I do about consonants that are simultaneously in a palatalizing environment and a pharyngealizing environment? Would these two things just cancel eachother out, or what do you think should happen?

[----]

What's something wacky I can do with /j/ that isn't just fortition to /dZ/?

[ObsequiousNewt]

Assuming it's intervocalic, I think Proto-Germanic had VjV > V::. Alternatively, you could cause umlaut of the first vowel.

[GreenBowTie]

What's something wacky I can do with /j/ that isn't just fortition to /dZ/?

strengthen it to /i/, then use that to fuck up following vowels
/ja/ /ia/ /iə/
/je/ /ie/ /iə/
/ji/ /ii/ /iː/
/jo/ /io/ /y/
/ju/ /iu/ /y/
something like that

[Zaarin]

What's something wacky I can do with /j/ that isn't just fortition to /dZ/?

I can't cite you a source, but I'm almost certain some language (I want to say it's either Afro-Asiatic or Native American, which I realize isn't very helpful but those are the two groups I've studied recently ) has j > w word-initially. Not particularly wacky, but j > ʝ (> ç) is a possibility, or palatalizing preceding consonants. If did go with fortition to /ʤ/, you could front it to /ʣ/, lenite it to /ʒ/, or perhaps fortite it to /d/.

[Pogostick Man]

I can't cite you a source, but I'm almost certain some language (I want to say it's either Afro-Asiatic or Native American, which I realize isn't very helpful but those are the two groups I've studied recently ) has j > w word-initially.

I think I read it either on the board or on Wikipedia, but Hebrew is thought to have had the opposite happen: *w- > *j-.

[vokzhen]

There's a few that take it to /ð/, and you can fortify it to /gʲ/ (or kʲ/ if you don't have a voicing contrast) instead. Possibly through the former I think some have laterals, though if I'm misremembering and I'm only getting that through reconstructed Austronesian that should probably be taken with a grain of salt (*j ends up at all of /j h d r l n s z ts ð ɬ tʃ g/ and null, so it's probably worth assuming *j is a placeholder and it was probably not actually [j]).

[Mugitus]

Any ideas on how I can get some contrastive nasal fricatives such as in Waffa in Papua New Guinea?

[----]

Any ideas on how I can get some contrastive nasal fricatives such as in Waffa in Papua New Guinea?

The Songhay language I'm studying right now (Tondi Songway) has a nasality distinction in glides, arising from lenition of the phonemes /ɲ ŋʷ/. You could potentially go this route and then have the new glides fortite into /ṽ z̃/ or something.