Sound Change Quickie Thread

[zyxw59]

What can I do with ʎ besides merging it with l or j?

[KathTheDragon]

Vocalise to /i/

[gach]

You can have palatal breaking where the palatal quality dislocates itself from the lateral for example into a palatal off-glide of a preceding vowel and leaves behind an alveolar lateral. The dislocation might also jump over another preceding consonant:

Vʎ > Vil
VCʎ > ViCl

If the language has a palatal nasal, that's very likely to follow the same changes.

[vokzhen]

Probably depending on what else your language has, Chinese did ɲ > ɻ (along with a general change of palatals merging into retroflexes), something similar could probably happen to a lateral rather than a nasal. Asturian, Sardinian, Sicilian, and Corsican ended up with ɖ < Latin ll, as far as I know going through ʎ(ʎ) like other Romance, and apparently some of their dialects have retroflex or alveolar(denti-alveolar?) affricates instead.

[WeepingElf]

Chinese did ɲ > ɻ

I guess that with "Chinese", you actually mean "Mandarin".

[احمکي ارش-ھجن]

In Vrkhazhian there is phonemic /r/, but it is analyzed as [rʷ], unconditionally.
I compare this to how the English "r" is realized as pharyngealized and labialized.

Could this be plausible, being the only labialized consonant?

[vokzhen]

Chinese did ɲ > ɻ

I guess that with "Chinese", you actually mean "Mandarin".

Maybe I do. Wikipedia has the change both under EMC->LMC, thus affecting most or all non-Min varieties (by my very limited understanding of Chinese languages), but also under LMC->Mandarin. I just noticed the inconsistency.

[احمکي ارش-ھجن]

In Vrkhazhian there is phonemic /r/, but it is analyzed as [rʷ], unconditionally.
I compare this to how the English "r" is realized as pharyngealized and labialized.

Could this be plausible, being the only labialized consonant?

I still don't know

[Dē Graut Bʉr]

Well, it seems to work fine in English.

[ęzo]

Are there any plausible routes for turning aspiration before a consonant into schwa? (Thus e.g. /pʰdoɣa/ → /pǝdoɣa/.)

[chris_notts]

Are there any plausible routes for turning aspiration before a consonant into schwa? (Thus e.g. /pʰdoɣa/ → /pǝdoɣa/.)

Well, aspiration is realised as a voiceless burst after the consonant. If the consonant is followed by an obstruent, and especially another stop, or is word final, then normally I think there will be a short epenthetic voiceless vowel, otherwise you just won't be able hear the aspiration well. The epenthetic vowel will be probably be short and of very variable quality, but something schwa-like seems pretty likely. I don't know about you, but when I try to pronounce your word without any audible phonetic vowel-like transition, I fail.

So what I think you'd get is:

/pʰdoɣa/ = [pʰə̥̆doɣa]

Then all you need is for your speakers to perceive this phonetic transition effect as an actual phonological vowel, and you're there.

[ęzo]

Thanks. I had thought along similar lines; intuitively it made sense to me (hence why it was considered for a sound change in the first place) but linguistically I was having trouble justifying it (an unvoiced-consonantal feature becoming a vowel seemed odd). Are there any natlangs where something like this was phonemicized?

[Pole, the]

Thanks. I had thought along similar lines; intuitively it made sense to me (hence why it was considered for a sound change in the first place) but linguistically I was having trouble justifying it (an unvoiced-consonantal feature becoming a vowel seemed odd). Are there any natlangs where something like this was phonemicized?

Hmm.

Sanskrit went the other way round, didn't it?

[vokzhen]

You might have a basis in languages that fully release every consonant. They don't have aspiration, but Amis and maybe some of the other Formosan languages are described as having full release of consonants, with non-phonemic (though often written) schwas breaking up all clusters, and sometimes occurring word-finally as well. At least some Salish languages are described as fully releasing every stop; the example Wikipedia has with Montana Flathead Salish says stops aspirate before obstruents and aspirate with an epenthetic schwa before sonorants. You could possibly use those as a basis for creating aspiration-to-vocalization. Though I'm not sure how/if it would work if you contrast aspirated and plain consonants.

[Nortaneous]

Inventory: /b t d k f s h m n ŋ/.

k > ?, ŋ > k.

There are syllabic nasals. There's also a fricated vowel, which can't appear after nasals, so I've been analyzing syllabic nasals as nasal + fricated vowel.

What happens to syllabic ŋ? ŋ > kv̩ seems too strange, but would there be syllabic ŋ once consonantal ŋ has disappeared?

[Pogostick Man]

What happens to syllabic ŋ? ŋ > kv̩ seems too strange, but would there be syllabic ŋ once consonantal ŋ has disappeared?

I remember reading on Wikipedia of a language (somewhere Sub-Saharan, IIRC) that had a syllabic velar nasal but not a consonantal one.

EDIT: It's Nǁng.

[Cedh]

What happens to syllabic ŋ? ŋ > kv̩ seems too strange, but would there be syllabic ŋ once consonantal ŋ has disappeared?

What about something like /ŋ̩/ > /n̩k/ [ŋ̩k] ~ /kn̩/ [kŋ̩] depending on the environment?

[finlay]

Inventory: /b t d k f s h m n ŋ/.

k > ?, ŋ > k.

There are syllabic nasals. There's also a fricated vowel, which can't appear after nasals, so I've been analyzing syllabic nasals as nasal + fricated vowel.

What happens to syllabic ŋ? ŋ > kv̩ seems too strange, but would there be syllabic ŋ once consonantal ŋ has disappeared?

You could certainly have that. Remember that sound changes happen on the phonetic level, not the phonemic, and especially not the purely theoretical areas like that where you're analyzing a syllabic nasal as something else entirely. Your speakers have no incentive or motive to change ŋ to kv, since they can't see the theoretical phonemes you've come up with. I'd just keep it with the weird syllabic nasal that doesn't match a consonant.

[alynnidalar]

I'm out of ideas... what's something interesting that a word-final glottal stop can do, aside from simply being dropped?

[communistplot]

I'm out of ideas... what's something interesting that a word-final glottal stop can do, aside from simply being dropped?

It can lower and back surrounding vowels, fortite into /t/ or /k/, lenite into /h/.

[Porphyrogenitos]

I'm out of ideas... what's something interesting that a word-final glottal stop can do, aside from simply being dropped?

It can cause the preceding vowel to become glottalized, or to become creaky voiced. It could also cause the vowel to gain either a high or low tone. (Glottalization and creaky voice could both also lead to a tonal outcome.)

[vokzhen]

I'm out of ideas... what's something interesting that a word-final glottal stop can do, aside from simply being dropped?

It can lower and back surrounding vowels, fortite into /t/ or /k/, lenite into /h/.

Out of curiosity, do you have examples of backing that aren't recently derived from debuccalizing /q/? In Mesoamerica, glottalized vowels tend to front, and from my much-more-limited understanding they did the same in the history of some Southeast Asian languages. (Maybe this is two different types of "glottalization," like how creak can give way to high or low tone?)

EDIT: As for other ideas, rhinoglottophilia, nasalizing a previous vowel. Might work better as morpheme-finally rather than just word-finally, but it could simply elide while blocking processes like intervocal lenition, or cause new processes like gemination in the next morpheme (maybe like syntactic doubling in Italian).

[Zaarin]

In one stage of a family I'm working on I have deletion of sequences of /eC/ before consonants in a stressed syllable. Since the syllable structure was C(C)V(C), this can lead to clusters of the same shape as affricates. Cf. ?tšam vs. ?čam. In the following stage of the language /t͡ʃ/ > /ʃ/. Would the cluster most likely be analyzed as an affricate and also become /ʃ/ or would it most likely remain /tʃ/? The society is semi-pre-literate (that is to say, it has no written form of its own, but as a client kingdom of a nearby literate empire it is sometimes written in that empire's abugida. The above examples would both be written as ?ČA-M0 by foreign scribes, but ?TA-ŠA-M0/TA-ČA-M0 and ?ČA-M0 by native scribes. Note that the abugida only allows 0 forms word-finally; otherwise a dummy vowel marker must be used. This matches the native syllable structure which is CV, or CV(C) word-finally.)

[Pole, the]

/ɡʷ/ → /d/, thoughts?

[Dē Graut Bʉr]

/kʷ/ /t/ has happened, so why not?