zompist bboard

Could it work simply adding weight-insensitive trochaic rythmic stress, adding offglides to the long wovels in stressed positions (currently codas aren't permitted), shortening unstressed long vowels, and then have unstressed vowels harmonize to a preceeding stressed vowel in tenseness (possibly with further reductions of unstressed lax vowels to schwa)?
The messy nature of vowel shifts is figuratively the bane of my exsistence, as I really like things to be nice and orderly.

gufferdk wrote:Additionally, i remember reading somewhere that contour tones tend to lengthen the vowel compared to register tones


Given this I think doing something like this with my starting inventory doesn't seem too unrealistic, especially if i pretend my starting /˩ ˦ ˥˩/ wasn't purely a pitch contrast:
ɨ ə > u o /_C[+dorsal (or glottal, probably)]
ɨ ə > u o /ʀ_
ɨ ə > i e /otherwise
V˥˩ > Vː
i˦ u˦ e˦ o˦ a˦ > ɪ ʊ ɛ ɔ a
possibly a˩ > ə or ʌ
V˩ > V

Fronting of velars to alveolars of some description, and uvulars to velars could then phonemicise the front/back distinction leaving me with /i iː ɪ u uː ʊ e eː ɛ o oː ɔ a aː (ə or ʌ)/ which would then probably be unstable as hell thanks to the 5-way height contrast. Thoughts?

In some of my conlangs, I have á > aʔ. This was an areal feature that arose by influence of a language, Khulls, where the high tone had in fact arisen partly from vowels followed by a glottal stop. In this language, all vowels in closed syllables came to have high tone, and the glottal stop later became allophonic, leaving behind only its effect on the tone. That is, it would appear only when a high-tone vowel was followed by another vowel, and before fricatives. Later, this tendency spread out to other languages that had never had a phonemic glottal stop to begin with, and these languages lost their tones, essentially completing the same sound shift in reverse.

This final glottal stop in turn couples with following consonants to produce (in most cases) geminates: ʔn > nn, ʔt > tt, but ʔs > ts and ʔh > qh.

Most of these languages also inherited phonemic long vowels from the parent language, which were originally a falling tone, and before that, were sequences of high + low vowels of the same or similar type. Thus, there were three types of syllables: simple (CV), closed (CVC), and long (CVV). There were no examples of long vowels followed by final consonants because long vowels arose only from sequences ending in a low-tone vowel.

I didnt check with natlangs before making this sound change, but it seems sensible to me. If you were to go with this option, you could have a means to change vowel quality, since I think a shift of /iʔ/ > /ɪ/ > something else would be reasonable, along with similar shifts for all the other vowels. However, I'm not as sure of the feasibility of a language acquiring a phonemic post-vocalic glottal stop on its own, without the influence of neighboring languages.

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Your other idea makes sense to me, and could produce a similar outcome to what happened in my languages by a different mechanism. High-tone vowels become pharyngealized, which changes their vowel quality to a more central one, which leads to subsequent vowel shifts. Meanwhile, falling-tone vowels become long (they were probably long to begin with), and do not change quality. Low-tone vowels remain as they were, leading to a three-way contrast of simple vs "centralized" vs long. The centralized vowels could never be long, since they were never in the same environment that caused the sound change. On the other hand, perhaps the long vowels become diphthongs with a centralized vowel as their first component at least some of the time, leading to a more symmetrical setup. For example, /i:/ could become /əi/.

In the history of English there was a change whereby [ð] <> [d] in the vicinity of <r>. Thus, fader > father, but murther > murder. In effect, <th> and <d> switched places with each other in the same environment. I was wondering how this was possible and what the intermediary steps were, if any.

Are you sure there is no distinction between an intervocalic position before /r/ and being directly after /r/ for this sound change? If there is a distinction, the second seems like plain, one step fortition. Don't know about the other one.

mèþru wrote:Are you sure there is no distinction between an intervocalic position before /r/ and being directly after /r/ for this sound change? If there is a distinction, the second seems like plain, one step fortition. Don't know about the other one.

Admittedly, 'murther' was the only example of the latter I could remember, so I'm not sure, but I don't believe the change was affected by a preceding <r>, only by a following one. I might be wrong; I can't find the source I originally read it in.

Edit
After further research, exceptions are pretty common. "Feather" didn't become "feader", "further" didn't become "furder". Maybe the change was more regular in -der, but only sporadic in -ther.

In this post, ejectives are indicated by following apostrophes.

Do you think /k'p k't/ > /p' t'/ is a likely sound change? I'm guessing that there are not many languages that distinguish ejectives in syllable-final position before another stop, or even perhaps before another consonant. But this language likes to "front-load" its syllables by metathesizing codas from previous syllables into the onset of the next syllable. For example, I have /hd/ > /dʰ/ unconditionally. (this later merges with /t/ in most daughters, but one of them picks /s/ instead).

Regardless of whether this sound change makes sense or not, I kind of need it to be true, since this is for a distant ancestor of all my main conlangs, and I've already determined what the final output could be. But it only occurs over morpheme boundaries, so if the sound change isn't possible directly, I could still rescue it by saying it happened at a later date, independently in the different branches, at a time when syllable-final /ḳ/ had changed unconditionally to /ʔ/. And I'm pretty sure /ʔp ʔt/ > /p' t'/ is possible, even though it's probably still less common than simple gemination to /pp tt/.

edit: In response to the post below: sorry, it didnt occur to me to use apostrophes, since I usually type in SAMPA since its easier, and i find the _> notation cumbersome. Privately, since i have hotkeys for dot keys like those in /ṗ ṭ ḳ/, theyre the same number of keystrokes for me as the plain letter + apostrophe forms.

*blush*

While I'm not too familiar with how ejectives behave, I see no reason why that couldn't happen.

I'm also curious why you're not using /p'/ etc. to indicate ejectives, which is not only instantly recognisable, but also easier to type.

In a language with /kʷ/ but no /gʷ/, does this sound change make sense? tw dw > kʷ gʷ

Zaarin wrote:In a language with /kʷ/ but no /gʷ/, does this sound change make sense? tw dw > kʷ gʷ

I've done that exact change, and while I often go outside the boundaries of attested sound changes, I can at least tell you that it "feels right" since labiality goes hand-in-hand with velar articulation and even in Irish you can see /d/ > /g/ when before a labial.

I remember reading in proto-Germanic that there was /kʷ/ and very very little /gʷ/ (only after [ŋ]) for no particular reason, so there's a chance that somehow coarticulated consonants like /kʷ/ are more commonly voiceless than voiced ... I dont think the change /dw/ > /dʷ/ > /gʷ/ is bad, but if it bothers you, you might be able to come up with a way to push it just a little bit further and make it unconditionally /kʷ/. I dont think a rule that coarticulated consonants must be voiceless would be unnatural.

Zaarin wrote:In a language with /kʷ/ but no /gʷ/, does this sound change make sense? tw dw > kʷ gʷ

Completely believable. If Latin can turn /dw/ into /b/, the change you describe is fully plausible. As another related change, Kinyarwanda inserted intrusive velar stops between some consonants and /w/, so you could also use that route.

Soap wrote:very very little /gʷ/ (only after [ŋ]) for no particular reason

It was actually due to a sound change ɣʷ > w, which didn't apply after *n because the voiced fricatives were stops in that position.

Thanks.

Where do the voiced clusters in the Greek words hebdomad and ogdoad come from? Im not really expecting anyone to have the answer, since if it was known it'd probably be in the etymology on Wiktionary. Im just idly wondering. If I had to make a guess at it myself, I'd say its probably borrowing from a dialect which for some reason coined these two words and then gave them to the other dialects. Also seems it may have happened in smaragdos "emerald" although no older form seems to be attested since it's a loanword.

Assuming you're talking about forms of the numerals 7 and 8, I believe the one in 8 is analogical to the one in 7, and that one is explained as resulting from contact with the m. How plausible that is I don't really know.

KathTheDragon wrote:analogical to the one in 7, and that one is explained as resulting from contact with the m. How plausible that is I don't really know.

Exactly. That is one of those ad-hoc explanations that are perpetuated by the handbooks because no-one has actually come up with anything better. There are loads of -tm- clusters in Greek; why did the voicing only happen in one word? The only clear thing is that the voicing in "7th" and "8th" is somehow related.

Presumably one of them is analogical to the other, so the question becomes how to explain it. Only problem is, there are no other examples of voicing of the unvoiced stops in Greek, tmk.

Maybe it's connected to Slavic *sedmŭ ← PIE *septmós?

Pole, the wrote:Maybe it's connected to Slavic *sedmŭ ← PIE *septmós?

I wouldn't bet against it, but in Slavic it a) also shows up in the cardinal number (which is, however, often explained as influence from the ordinal) and b) there are more cases of voicing in "t plus resonant" (e.g. all -tl- clusters).
Edit: @Kath - yes, exactly.

Short of positing voicing from contact with *h₃ in "8" (which IMO doesn't even happen) it seems that the only possible hypothesis is dialect loaning.

This is probably the easiest question/thing to answer but I haven't worked with altlanging in a while so I've lost sensibilities with phonology, ∴ does this sound fair?:

io ø
iu y

Nannalu wrote:This is probably the easiest question/thing to answer but I haven't worked with altlanging in a while so I've lost sensibilities with phonology, ∴ does this sound fair?:

io ø
iu y

Sounds OK to me.

Nannalu wrote:This is probably the easiest question/thing to answer but I haven't worked with altlanging in a while so I've lost sensibilities with phonology, ∴ does this sound fair?:

io ø
iu y

Ive actually used this shift before. But Im curious, are those 1) disyllabic vowel sequences, 2) Finnish-like diphthongs, or 3) Spanish-like rising diphthongs such that they'd be spelled /jo ju/ in IPA? The first two types make perfect sense to me. If it's the third type, I'd still say it makes sense but it might not be as likely since a simple offglide /j/ isnt likely to overpower a following vowel enough to bring it to the front. Still, given that there are plenty of examples of vowels fronting with no influence at all, I'd say the third scenario is perfectly believable as well.

Yes

Does #tl > #kl seem reasonable?

Absolutely.