Substantial postings about constructed languages and constructed worlds in general. Good place to mention your own or evaluate someone else's. Put quick questions in C&C Quickies instead.
Bristel wrote:Is feature spreading from consonants to vowels something that works in reverse as well as forwards? (I can't remember the term for forward or reverse spreading). So if a consonant is breathy, can the breathy voice spread to preceding and/or following vowels?
Yeah why not, go for it.
Pharyngealized consonants in Arabic also change the vowel quality of the adjacent vowels (both preceding and following).
Bristel wrote:Is feature spreading from consonants to vowels something that works in reverse as well as forwards? (I can't remember the term for forward or reverse spreading). So if a consonant is breathy, can the breathy voice spread to preceding and/or following vowels?
It's progressive for forward and regressive for backward.
Bristel wrote:Is feature spreading from consonants to vowels something that works in reverse as well as forwards? (I can't remember the term for forward or reverse spreading). So if a consonant is breathy, can the breathy voice spread to preceding and/or following vowels?
Yeah why not, go for it.
Pharyngealized consonants in Arabic also change the vowel quality of the adjacent vowels (both preceding and following).
Laryngeals also spread their features (voicelessness for /h/, creakiness for /ʔ/) regressively in Cayuga.
"But if of ships I now should sing, what ship would come to me,
What ship would bear me ever back across so wide a Sea?”
And there's those languages where nasalization is a word-level phenomenon. Tone can act backwards or forwards from the same trigger, as evidence by Punjabi.
...brought to you by the Weeping Elf Tha cvastam émi cvastam santham amal phelsa. -- Friedrich Schiller ESTAR-3SG:P human-OBJ only human-OBJ true-OBJ REL-LOC play-3SG:A
Salmoneus wrote:(NB Dewrad is behaving like an adult - a petty, sarcastic and uncharitable adult, admittedly, but none the less note the infinitely higher quality of flame)
Dewrad wrote:
Yes. /a/ often seems to be more resistant to loss than other vowels.
Is that really the case? That's interesting. I would've imagined it was more prone to loss due to its propensity to turn into /ə/.
I was thinking the same thing, but thinking a bit more, /i u/ are far more prone to devoicing, for example, and merging short /i u/ into a single central vowel and then dropping it isn't terribly uncommon I don't believe. Old English dropped high vowels in some contexts where open vowels weren't (and vice versa). Pure speculation on my part, but part of it might be that languages with reduction tend to lose /a/ > /ə/ > zero, while those that directly delete them lose the high vowel.
WeepingElf wrote:Is there any natlang precedent for ʕ > r?
Can a "uvular R" type change go backwards? If so, I could see a shift of ʕ > ʀ~ʁ > r.
I've read that the fronting of uvular R has been posited for some Austronesian languages.
I'd take that with a serious grain of salt if you're basing it off the proto-language. At least according to the sources Wikipedia uses, the sound reconstructed as *R or *ɣ more often has a coronal reflex than a dorsal one, if I'm interpreting correctly those with dorsals exist inside families that otherwise lack them, and a quick glance at a map shows those that have a dorsal are situated adjacent to each other (Atayal in the middle, with Pazeh to the west and Kavalan to the NE). But afaict a dorsal reflex is common throughout the huge Malayo-Polynesian branch, which might be biasing the reconstruction as a dorsal. EDIT: My point being that despite being reconstructed as *R or *ɣ, a coronal seems more likely.
Zaarin wrote:High vowels can cause palatalization.
You mean front vowels, right?
I thought so, too.
My own question: In purely diachronic terms, how common is [θ ð] [f v]? I know it's attested; the question is about that change in standard native speech.
StrangerCoug wrote:My own question: In purely diachronic terms, how common is [θ ð] [f v]? I know it's attested; the question is about that change in standard native speech.
Take Latin as an example, it has *θ *ð > /f b/. The other Italic languages have similar outcomes. I was thinking there was a sporadic second round of this with Romance, where *ð (< /t d/) sometimes ended up as /v/ in the modern languages irregularly, but I can't find my source on that.
StrangerCoug wrote:My own question: In purely diachronic terms, how common is [θ ð] [f v]? I know it's attested; the question is about that change in standard native speech.
Take Latin as an example, it has *θ *ð > /f b/. The other Italic languages have similar outcomes. I was thinking there was a sporadic second round of this with Romance, where *ð (< /t d/) sometimes ended up as /v/ in the modern languages irregularly, but I can't find my source on that.
Pole, the wrote:The most logical counterpart of palatalization would be velarization.
Aili Meilani wrote:In addition to what others said, if the back vowels in question are low, they could cause pharyngealization, since [ɑ] is pretty much a syllabic [ʕ].
I do indeed have [ɑ], so pharyngealization works perfectly. Thanks.
"But if of ships I now should sing, what ship would come to me,
What ship would bear me ever back across so wide a Sea?”
[f v]? I know it's attested; the question is about that change in standard native speech.
