Sound Change Quickie Thread

[StrangerCoug]

I buy them both.

[Pogostick Man]

Vurës seems to have gotten labiovelars from labials before a rounded vowel, at least in some instances.

[----]

The conditioning environment for labiovelars or similar sounds in North Vanuatu is indeed the sound preceding /u o/ or following /u/. However, languages occasionally block the labial shift if the original vowels remain unchanged.

[Chengjiang]

[θ] > [k] as an unconditional change? My gut tells me it's possible via, say, [x] or [θˠ] or [tˠ], but I'm not sure. I admit I mainly want this so a specific language family can have really weird sound correspondences.

Come to think of it, one sound change I see being brought up a lot here (especially as an intermediate) is [x] > [k]. I don't actually know of any unconditional natlang examples of this one, myself; just rather specific conditional ones. Anyone got any examples?

[Pogostick Man]

Cavineña seems to have had unconditional *x → k.

[Ketumak]

Thanks for all the ideas on labio-velar co-articulates. I'm not sure which ones I'll take up as I've hardly begun to think about the earlier phoneme inventory for this language (Senduri, the orginal language of Mohai. It influenced the island's main language Lemohai and survives in pockets). It's good to know then that there's more than one option.

[Zaarin]

I have a plosive inventory of /pʰ b tʰ tʼ d kʰ kʼ g ʔ/. I want to spirantize my voiceless plosives /f θ>ʃ x>ħ/ but I don't want to give up my ejectives, which suggests I probably want the spirantization to be condition. I was thinking something like this:
P/F/#_
P/F/V_C

I'd also like to increase the frequency of ejectives (i.e., T/Ṭ/_) before I go about spirantizing. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to refine this so I don't lose my plain vs. ejective distinction and so that ejectives become somewhat more common?

[Pogostick Man]

Fortescue's dictionary on Chukotko-Kamchatkan says that Itelmen gained ejectives from initial SVF and NVS sequences where the vowel dropped.

[Acid Badger]

Assimilation like for example CʰVCʼ > CʼVCʼ would increase the frequency of ejectives in your language. Does it allow consonant clusters? If not, elide some vowels and get new ejectives out of clusters. Besides the obvious Cʔ ʔC, something like sC > Cʼ works too.

[Zaarin]

Fortescue's dictionary on Chukotko-Kamchatkan says that Itelmen gained ejectives from initial SVF and NVS sequences where the vowel dropped.

That is a really cool sound change, but I don't think it will work on many words. The language in question is Semitic, so I feel like analogy is going to level this sort of change.

Assimilation like for example CʰVCʼ > CʼVCʼ would increase the frequency of ejectives in your language. Does it allow consonant clusters? If not, elide some vowels and get new ejectives out of clusters. Besides the obvious Cʔ ʔC, something like sC > Cʼ works too.

The assimilation could definitely work. Punic has very few initial clusters, but internal clusters--including Cʔ ʔC sC--are all very common. This could definitely work.

[KathTheDragon]

I have a language loosely based on Egyptian and Semitic, where I have ejectives allophonically arise from plain stop + glottal stop (there are already ejectives in the language, but this gives more). Tricon langs are apparently pretty tolerant of allophony, so long as it's predictable and reversible. That is, you can always extract the underlying form. Besides, even if it does get levelled, it could be the ejective that's levelled throughout the paradigm.

[Zaarin]

Excellent point.

[Chengjiang]

I've got a proto-language that distinguishes nasals, prenasalized voiced stops, fully oral voiced stops, and voiceless stops at most of its points of articulation. (So, /m mb b p n nd d t/ etc.) Would it be reasonable to have a descendant that innovated, say, a low tone in syllables headed by a voiced stop, whether simple or prenasalized, and then merged the prenasalized stops with the nasals and the simple voiced stops with the voiceless stops? In other words, [ma mba ba pa] > [ma ma˩ pa˩ pa] and so forth? I think this works, but I mainly wanted to confirm that it isn't unrealistic behavior for the prenasalized stops to pattern with the simple voiced stops and not the nasals.

[Pogostick Man]

I can't think of any specific examples, but on its face that seems reasonable to me.

[Zju]

[θ] > [k] as an unconditional change? My gut tells me it's possible via, say, [x] or [θˠ] or [tˠ], but I'm not sure. I admit I mainly want this so a specific language family can have really weird sound correspondences.

Come to think of it, one sound change I see being brought up a lot here (especially as an intermediate) is [x] > [k]. I don't actually know of any unconditional natlang examples of this one, myself; just rather specific conditional ones. Anyone got any examples?

If you have no f, then you can go with θ > f > x > k; it has attested unconditional changes at each step.

[Nortaneous]

look at what athabaskan did with its *interdentals

[vokzhen]

look at what athabaskan did with its *interdentals

For a specific example, South Slavey maintains interdentals (tθ tθʰ tθ' θ ð), while Northern Slavey changes them: Mountain has labials/labiodentals (p pʰ p' f v), Bear Lake has labiovelars (kʷ kʷʰ kʷ' hʷ w), and Hare has a mix of both alongside a merger of the aspirated affricates into fricatives (kʷ f ʔw f w).

[Chengjiang]

look at what athabaskan did with its *interdentals

For a specific example, South Slavey maintains interdentals (tθ tθʰ tθ' θ ð), while Northern Slavey changes them: Mountain has labials/labiodentals (p pʰ p' f v), Bear Lake has labiovelars (kʷ kʷʰ kʷ' hʷ w), and Hare has a mix of both alongside a merger of the aspirated affricates into fricatives (kʷ f ʔw f w).

OK, interdental > labial I kind of expect, but labiovelars and a split of labials and labiovelars are both crazy awesome. Honestly, at this point I think enough in the way of related changes has been established that I feel good about [θ] > [k].

If you have no f, then you can go with θ > f > x > k; it has attested unconditional changes at each step.

I could have sworn [θ] > [x] with no apparent intermediate was itself attested somewhere. At the very least it parallels [ð] > [ɣ], which is absolutely attested.

Speaking of labialized velars, though, what are some different changes people know of that generate them? The main ones I'm aware of are just super obvious things like rounding of velar (or sometimes glottal) segments in round-vowel environments and fortition of [w]. IIRC they're the most common type of consonant with a secondary articulation worldwide, so there must be more than that to generate them.

Come to think of it, is [p] > [kʷ] attested? I feel like I've seen that one somewhere.

[----]

A little bit of pedantry to start with, technically there's no historical evidence to ensure that the relevant set wasn't simply alveolar in Proto-Athabaskan and then later shifted to (inter)dental in Northern Athabaskan.

p > kʷ is attested in several examples as an irregular change in Indo-European varieties, a few languages (e.g. Tlingit) apparently borrow p as kʷ, and it was a probable intermediate in Arapaho, which has a *p to k~tʃ correspondence. In scattered areas of Oceanic we have near misses, where *ⁿb becomes *kʷ in a few different environments (before rounded vowels, after *u, etc.) Some of these examples of *ⁿb arise from a further reconstructed *p, with prenasalization coming about under obscure circumstances, so more or less this is the change played by the book.

Chamorro generates word initial /gw/ from null initials; but it probably was *w at some time before that anyway

[smii]

I could have sworn [θ] > [x] with no apparent intermediate was itself attested somewhere. At the very least it parallels [ð] > [ɣ], which is absolutely attested.

A dialect of Albanian has it.

[Zaarin]

θ > f is well attested; is there any reason it can't work the other way?

[Pogostick Man]

θ > f is well attested; is there any reason it can't work the other way?

It seems to have done so at least once. There's apparently an Oceanic language that did this (it's in the Bizzare sound changes thread, but I can't look it up right now as I have stuff to do before I go to work).

[Zaarin]

θ > f is well attested; is there any reason it can't work the other way?

It seems to have done so at least once. There's apparently an Oceanic language that did this (it's in the Bizzare sound changes thread, but I can't look it up right now as I have stuff to do before I go to work).

I might go with that then. Since my ultimate goal is /ʃ/, it also occurred to me I might go f > xʷ > x > ʃ, but f > θ > ʃ would certainly be faster--especially since θ > ʃ is already a change that I'm using.

[Nortaneous]

re: oceanic, some languages 'palatalized' labials to linguolabials before non-back vowels, and then some shifted linguolabials to (inter?)dentals

[Knit Tie]

To switch the topic, if I may: how do glottalised consonants arise?