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.
Nortaneous wrote:Depends on what liquids you have, I'd say. But you could definitely at least get away with prestopped nasals there.
I'd like to have /km kn tm tn/ and then I have a lateral /l/ that I really don't want to combine with anything.
Hmm. The only liquid is /l/? Maybe /pl tl kl/ shifted to a lateral affricate, which then turned into something.
I think I'm going to have /kl sl/ anyway, and say that */tl/ > /tɬ/, which is present in the languages anyway. Actually, what I'm going to have is this (word initially):
*pN tN kN sN > N tN kN sN (N = /m n/)
*pl tl kl sl > ɬ tɬ kl sl
Medially, they just got syllabified as coda + onset clusters, so it doesn't quite matter. Though I'll probably still have pl > ɬ / V_V. The entire thing is gonna result from some sort of vowel reduction process.
My conlang Tmaśareʔ has initial stop-nasal clusters (all of them non-homoorganic btw) and a /l/ that cannot appear after another consonant. This situation was diachronically derived by the following steps:
- kʷ > kw
- w l j > m n ɲ / C_V[+nasalized]
- remaining pl tl kl > pj tj kj > p ts tʃ
The peculiar distribution was then reinforced by deletion of vowels in pretonic syllables, which was blocked before /l/ because there were no CL clusters in the language at the time, but not before non-homoorganic nasals as such clusters already existed.
EDIT: Crud, no idea how I ended up with two posts, sorry. Can't delete this one for some reason.
Last edited by Jetboy on Tue Jun 14, 2011 8:27 pm, edited 2 times in total.
"A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort."
–Herm Albright
Even better than a proto-conlang, it's the *kondn̥ǵʰwéh₂s
Maybe fortition of /θ ð/ to dental plosives to contrast with alveolars? Or /ts dz/ to alveolar plosives to contrast with dentals? /r/ + dental clusters becoming alveolar, similar to the origin of retroflexes? I'm just guessing, though; you'd probably want these corroborated.
"A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort."
–Herm Albright
Even better than a proto-conlang, it's the *kondn̥ǵʰwéh₂s
ná'oolkiłí wrote:What could give rise to a dental/alveolar contrast in coronals?
Castillian turned Old Castillian /ts dz/ into /s̺ z̺/ and were later fronted into /θ ð/. Based off this it seems easy to create a change like the one you're looking for:
> [t̺] > [t̪]. That is to say that alveolar chronemes had their second consonant dropped, but these cheshirised the preceding consonant, making it apical. Then, with such similarity to alveolar /t/ the apical /t/ was fronted to a dental /t/, creating a contrast between dental and alveolar /t/.
It probably doesn't have to be a chroneme either. I imagine it could be any alveolar cluster.
Although I do have to say that this seems more an alphonic change than a phonemic one. It's just so hard for us humans to distinguish dental and alveolar in the most common case. But that probably doesn't matter as I'm sure your conrace behaves much more acutely
Zaris wrote:It's just so hard for us humans to distinguish dental and alveolar in the most common case.
Nah, it's pretty common actually. But I'd expect the alveolars to be slightly retroflexed / palatalized, or the dentals to be interdental, or something else going on to keep the two distinct.
I doubt it, but one thing you could do is collapse fricative+nasal sequences into prestopped nasals. That happened sporadically in some dialects of English.
Also, they could come from nasals after oral vowels. That happens in at least one natlang, I think, although I'd have to search the grammar folder on my old external to find it.
Nortaneous wrote:I doubt it, but one thing you could do is collapse fricative+nasal sequences into prestopped nasals. That happened sporadically in some dialects of English.
Hmm, right now I'm just toying with ideas for future languages that I haven't even began making yet, so I can't really tell if this works. The protolang only has /s/ and /h/, and /h/ can't appear in coda. If having that sound change right at the beginning it would only give:
sm > pⁿ
sn > tⁿ
Nortaneous wrote:Also, they could come from nasals after oral vowels. That happens in at least one natlang, I think, although I'd have to search the grammar folder on my old external to find it.
Nortaneous wrote:Also, they could come from nasals after oral vowels. That happens in at least one natlang, I think, although I'd have to search the grammar folder on my old external to find it.
Nortaneous wrote:Also, they could come from nasals after oral vowels. That happens in at least one natlang, I think, although I'd have to search the grammar folder on my old external to find it.
How do you mean?
an ãn > adⁿ an
Oh? I don't see why that would happen. And I'd need nasal vowels.
Not quite a sound change, but how realistic is it to have a rule that, when one consonant in a cluster is voiced, voicing spreads to the entire cluster? There's no voice distinction in the inventory, besides possibly /θ ð̥/, and that only appears in certain dialects; others have [s] or [ɬ] for /θ/ or [r] for /ð̥/.
Does it appear in any natlangs? I thought voicing assimilation almost always involved spreading in one direction, not a marked feature taking over the entire cluster if it appears anywhere.
Fanu wrote:Some nice ideas how to get rid of /tɬ tɬʼ/ ?
I have /tɬ/ > /tθ/ in Enzielu.
8Deer wrote:What is the best way to get /t͡ɬ/? I know the Aztecan languages developped it from /t/ before /a/. How did it originate in other languages?
Stop+lateral clusters, maybe? I'm sure there are better ways to get them, but I have no idea what they are. Might want to read up on the diachronics of some Native American langs; you'd probably find some fun things to do there.
Stop+lateral clusters, maybe? I'm sure there are better ways to get them, but I have no idea what they are. Might want to read up on the diachronics of some Native American langs; you'd probably find some fun things to do there.
Terpish developed them from /s/ and /ts/ shifting to the lateral position followed by /S/ and /tS/ shifting to fill their place. I think some of the Athabascan languages have something along those lines as well, although I don't remember for sure.
"There was a particular car I soon came to think of as distinctly St. Louis-ish: a gigantic white S.U.V. with a W. bumper sticker on it for George W. Bush."
Does it appear in any natlangs? I thought voicing assimilation almost always involved spreading in one direction, not a marked feature taking over the entire cluster if it appears anywhere.
Fanu wrote:Some nice ideas how to get rid of /tɬ tɬʼ/ ?
I have /tɬ/ > /tθ/ in Enzielu.
8Deer wrote:What is the best way to get /t͡ɬ/? I know the Aztecan languages developped it from /t/ before /a/. How did it originate in other languages?
Stop+lateral clusters, maybe? I'm sure there are better ways to get them, but I have no idea what they are. Might want to read up on the diachronics of some Native American langs; you'd probably find some fun things to do there.
Icelandic seems to have got it from geminate L. Well, i'm not sure if it's [tɬ] per se or if it's [tl̥] but they're quite close phonetically.
Also, a lot of non-native speakers of Welsh pronounce the Welsh LL as /kl/ in English, as in for instance the towns Llandudno or Llanelli, which end up as /klan/-dudno and /klanekli/. And this may be to do with the fact that in English /tl/ and /kl/ sound the same. So they're interpreting /ɬ/ as /tɬ/ and then pronouncing it the closest way in English, which is /kl/.
[tl̥] is just traditionalist transcription. It goes with all the other devoiced signs Icelandic has, I guess. Sometimes people pronounce it as an unvoiced approximant, sometimes as an unvoiced fricative. Depends on mood. I'm pretty sure that's how it is in most languages. The phonetic difference between the two is subjective at best.
And I'd need nasal vowels.
