Sound Change Quickie Thread

[Mr. Z]

We're not saying you said all can. We're saying you said most can. That's what you said, isn't it?

NO

Then what did you say?

[sirdanilot]

@chris_notts: that's pretty damn interesting !

It sounds like people wanting to keep the fortis/lenis distinction even word-initially, leading to changes in laryngeality.

[Astraios]

Do you know how many times I want to scream that into your face and spam your inbox with flames?
Tolerance is bliss.

If you want to scream in finlay's face and flamespam him, what kind of tolerance is that?

[Nortaneous]

We're not saying you said all can. We're saying you said most can. That's what you said, isn't it?

NO

Then what did you say?

stop trying to reason with stupid

stupid, by its nature as stupid, cannot be reasoned with

[sirdanilot]

Can we all please ignore 'Darkgamma' until he shows some sign of knowing what he's talking about? We are only feeding his ego by arguing with him.

[chris_notts]

@chris_notts: that's pretty damn interesting !

It sounds like people wanting to keep the fortis/lenis distinction even word-initially, leading to changes in laryngeality.

I think high functional load helps. In the case of the various Austronesian languages that developed word initial geminates, many of these came from losing a vowel in a reduplicated the initial syllable which was highly morphologically significant.

In the case of my conlang, massive vowel loss created a large number of initial clusters which then produced lots of initial geminates. I think this makes it more realistic that the distinction would mutate rather than simply be lost.

I'm not saying that high functional load always prevents merger, but I suspect it alters the likelihood of merger. If a distinction has almost no functional load AND it's hard to produce and/or perceive, it's probably more likely to be lost.

EDIT: Although there are actually many functions that a particular set of phonological patterns can have. Use to differentiate different lexical items is the obvious one, but other uses might include things like marking social identity.

For example, patterns of intense contact often involve languages converging in certain ways, but often certain distinctive grammatical, lexical, and/or phonological features of the language are identified as markers of group membership by speakers of the languages involved, and maintained by social pressure even as other areas undergo large changes in the direction of convergence. This could promote the preservation of certain features even if they seem very marked and/or unlikely to survive based on considerations like functional load.

[----]

I've been thinking about doing an English descendant and the sound changes I've implemented give Future English 7 vowels and only one syllable final stop. Would such a large merger of phonemes result in it being hard to understand what someone is talking about, or not?

[Ser]

I've been thinking about doing an English descendant and the sound changes I've implemented give Future English 7 vowels and only one syllable final stop. Would such a large merger of phonemes result in it being hard to understand what someone is talking about, or not?

They'd develop ways to express everything they need. So nope.

[Herr Dunkel]

Do you know how many times I want to scream that into your face and spam your inbox with flames?
Tolerance is bliss.

If you want to scream in finlay's face and flamespam him, what kind of tolerance is that?

The point is, I didn't do it yet.

And thank you sird for moving the thread along so smoothly.

I've been thinking about doing an English descendant and the sound changes I've implemented give Future English 7 vowels and only one syllable final stop. Would such a large merger of phonemes result in it being hard to understand what someone is talking about, or not?

It would be, yes, unless they develop some other distinction
If you assign the grapheme <u> a value of /u/ for the sake of discussion, you'd get this:
Words that would become homonyms:

pub > puC
pull > puC
push > puC
pun > puC
puff > puC
put > puC
purr > puC
puss > puC

Even though it's unrealistic to represent it this way, think about the homonyms and consider tone.

How common are recursive changes?

[----]

Most of those aren't stops, Darkgamma. What I meant by 'only one final stop' is that final /p t k b d g/ merge.
Well, not really. Only /t k d g/ merge, into /ʔ/ while /b p/ merge into /wʔ/.

They'd develop ways to express everything they need. So nope.

Do you think classifiers/noun classes could develop to avoid the problem of excessive homophony? They don't seem to have evolved this way in most languages, but it seems reasonable to me.

[Herr Dunkel]

Most of those aren't stops, Darkgamma. What I meant by 'only one final stop' is that final /p t k b d g/ merge.
Well, not really. Only /t k d g/ merge, into /ʔ/ while /b p/ merge into /wʔ/.

Ah, I misread.
You'd still have some homophony, though

[----]

I know. That's what my original question was about.

[Herr Dunkel]

I know. That's what my original question was about.

You can introduce irregular sound changes, but, seeing that you haven't flattened every consonant syllable-finally, it should be tolerable (how the heck does Mandarin work (rhetorical) )
Seeing that classes don't generally appear like that, you might want to consider some irregular sound change or suppletion or something.

[Whimemsz]

No, that's stupid.

One process that seems to be fairly common when large numbers of homophones are produced is compounding and/or reduplication. So "pot" could become /pɑʔ/ (or whatever), and "pop" could become /pɑʔpɑʔ/ or /pɑʔpin/ (<"pop+open") or the like. And there's always the option of borrowing from other languages. And you can leave a reasonable number of homophones in the language without it becoming difficult to understand/communicate, anyway.

------------------------------------------------------

psst... ejectives aren't actually voiceless.

My bad.

Also btw the "voiced > implosive > ejective" suggestion was simply meant to be more plausible than a change "voiced > ejective" with no intermediate steps.

[Ser]

No, that's stupid.

One process that seems to be fairly common when large numbers of homophones are produced is compounding and/or reduplication. So "pot" could become /pɑʔ/ (or whatever), and "pop" could become /pɑʔpɑʔ/ or /pɑʔpin/ (<"pop+open") or the like. And there's always the option of borrowing from other languages.

And creating classifiers (as mentioned above), lexicalizing morphemes (diminutives may be a favourite)...

[chris_notts]

Complete loss of syllable final consonants isn't unheard of, which is obviously more extreme than just merging some syllable final stops - and there are much worse sound changes from the point of view of homophony. Similarly for loss of all final vowels, which has also happened repeatedly.

Some Australian and Asian languages have lost entire syllables at the beginning of words.

If you have 20 consonants and 5 vowels, CV syllable structure, and every possible two syllable word exists, then each resulting new word would have the same form as 5*20 - 1 = 99 other originally disyllabic words. Generally it's not quite that bad because a lot of those languages had "sesqui-syllabic" structure with reduced vowel distinctions in the initial syllable, but still there must have been a massive number of mergers.

A number of the Asian languages in question combine this with loss of some final codas (partially compensated for by tone), just to make the problem worse.

Sound changes such as the deletion of every other (unstressed) vowel are also much more serious from a merger point of view than just losing a few codas, unless every syllable in your language ends in a coda.

For example, if you have 5 vowels and you lose all unstressed vowels, then if all the possible 4 syllable words existed, each resulting new word would have the same form as 5^2 - 1 = 24 other originally four syllable words. Two syllable words merge with 4 other two syllable words because they only lose one vowel.

Whereas if you reduce a distinction between 6 codas to 2 codas, you just reduce the number of possible syllables by 3 / 7 (counting the no coda case as well), which is just slightly worse than half. And the effect isn't even that bad because English has a lot of other codas which wouldn't be affected, and which make the overall ratio better.

In short, merging a load of English codas might produce some problems, but there are repeatedly attested sound changes which have done a lot worse. All you need is compounding, use of some other word formation technique, or just replacement by alternative lexemes to remove the most confusing mergers.

EDIT: French has done a lot worse. It managed to change "Augustus" into "août" /ut/ for example.

[8Deer]

My question seems to have provoked a lot of discussion. I guess the problem is my ignorance. I had thought that glottalization was a type of secondary articulation.

How does glottalization develop as an areal feature? Is it purely through borrowing? For example, how did Ossetian develop its ejective consonants?

[Ser]

EDIT: French has done a lot worse. It managed to change "Augustus" into "août" /ut/ for example.

Often just pronounced as a stressed /u/, actually. (As opposed to the conjunction "ou", which is generally unstressed.) On va le faire en août ou en juin [õ.val.fɛʁ.ɑ̃n.ˈu u̯ɑ̃ˈʒuæ̃]. Dialectally the hiatus /a.u(t)/ can also be heard...

[Earthling]

Attempting to get some nasal vowels... How plausible is this?

(N = nasal consonant, L = liquid)
V > Ṽ / _N#, _ N [stop]#, _ N [stop] V, _ŋ, _LN
N > 0 / _[stop +voiced]#
[stop -voiced] > 0 / N_#
N > 0 / VL_#
ŋ > g / V[+nasalized]_#, V[+nasalized]_C
ø̃ > œ̃
ĩ ỹ ũ > ẽ œ̃ õ

[Cedh]

Attempting to get some nasal vowels... How plausible is this?

(N = nasal consonant, L = liquid)
V > Ṽ / _N#, _ N [stop]#, _ N [stop] V, _ŋ
N > 0 / _[stop +voiced]#
[stop -voiced] > 0 / N_#
N > 0 / VL_#
ø̃ > œ̃
ĩ ỹ ũ > ẽ œ̃ õ

The parts above are very plausible, except that I'd expect nasal vowels in _N(C) positions to develop not just in the final syllable of a word, but in all comparable environments, and that general nasalisation before [ŋ] but not before other nasal consonants would seem unplausibly selective, too.

The parts below, however, aren't all that plausible. For the first line, nasalisation is very unlikely to spread through a liquid consonant without turning that liquid into a nasal. For the second line, denasalisation in an explicitly nasal environment seems strange too. [ŋ] > [g] in all positions could work though.

V > Ṽ / _LN
ŋ > g / V[+nasalized]_#, V[+nasalized]_C

[jmcd]

Personally, I'd expect the following :

N > 0 / _[stop +voiced]#
[stop -voiced] > 0 / N_#

to be reversed in voicing i.e.

N > 0 / _[stop -voiced]#
[stop +voiced] > 0 / N_#

Look at English for example:
fimf> fīf> five

but lamb [5am]

[Earthling]

V > Ṽ / _N#, _ N [stop]
N > 0 / _[stop -voiced]#
[stop +voiced] > 0 / N_#
N > 0 / VL_#
ŋ > g / _#, _C
ø̃ > œ̃
ĩ ỹ ũ > ẽ œ̃ õ

Is this better?

[Alces]

V > Ṽ / _N#, _ N [stop]
N > 0 / _[stop -voiced]#
[stop +voiced] > 0 / N_#
N > 0 / VL_#
ŋ > g / _#, _C
ø̃ > œ̃
ĩ ỹ ũ > ẽ œ̃ õ

Is this better?

Yes. That's all very plausible.

[faiuwle]

From a proto-lang with a series of laminal coronals phonemically contrasted with the apicals:

Would it make sense to do something like [t̻ s̻ ʦ̻] -> [θ ʃ ʧ]? Would t̻ be more likely to shift in the palatal/postalveolar direction rather than to θ? Would s̻ be more likely go the other way? How likely is the genesis of θ if there are no other plosive -> fricative changes?

If the proto-lang has all of /tʰ t s ʦ n l/ as apical coronals, which ones are least likely to have contrasting laminals? Would it make sense for some of the apical/laminal pairs to merge, but not others?

Are laminals less stable than apicals (or vice versa)?

[jmcd]

Well, in Australia the distinction is most often lost in laterals, taps and trills. In Basque, the distinction is only found in the fricatives. So it seems to depend on the language. But merging some but not others definitely makes sense.

Retroflexes are generally apical post-alveolar, whereas alveolo-palatals are laminal post-alveolars and palato-alveolar are domed and partly palatalised post-alveolars. So if you want to shift one, you could shift it e.g.
apical alveolar v laminal alveolar > apical post-alveolar v laminal alveolar > retroflex v alveolar. Also, what you can take form that is that getting to ʃ should probably have an intermediary of ɕ or ʂ, depending on the starting point.

I am not sure about the t̻ > θ change. I suppose t/s/_i might be seen as similar. (?)

If you want your θ, you could do what Castilian did and do s̪ > θ̟.