vowel sound changes 3: this time it's personal

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LinguistCat
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vowel sound changes 3: this time it's personal

Post by LinguistCat »

Starting from the vowel inventory /a i ɨ e ɛ o ɔ u/, I was planning to have /a e ɛ/ raise to [æ ɛ ɪ] or there about in certain environments, and keep /i ɨ/ the same, but I'm not sure if I want /o ɔ u/ to raise, unround, front, or do some combo of those. My first thought was to make them [ə ə ʉ] because I eventually want /ɨ~ɯ~u/ to be a thing, influenced by Japanese and some Ryukyuan languages, and I also eventually wanted to have the freedom to turn the schwas into basically whatever felt the most balanced.

Also, I've previously asked about nasal vowels and sound changes that result from those, so I know what direction I want to go with that in particular. But, would the sound change above be able to stop certain vowels from being nasalized, at least in some cases? Should all the resulting vowels from the inventory resulting get nasalized and go on to be altered more later? Are there vowels that cross linguistically are less likely to nasalize, even if the rest of a vowel inventory is nasalizing?

I really just have very poor intuition when it comes to vowels and how they change besides vaguely sliding around the vowel chart. I do intend to reanalyze the results of this whole set of changes into something with about 4-7 vowels, but I want to get my base changes figured out first.
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Re: vowel sound changes 3: this time it's personal

Post by Frislander »

vampyre_smiles wrote:/a e ɛ/ raise to [æ ɛ ɪ]
I think you've mixed up your symbols, /e/ is lower than /ɛ/, so you'd expect a raising change to show /ɛ/ > /e/ not the other way round.

As for the nasalisation, my instinct is to say no, no vowel is "more resistant" to nasalisation, but nasal vowels are less distinct phonetically and thus more like to merge, which is why you often see nasal vowels which aren't perfect mirror-images of the oral vowel system.
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Re: vowel sound changes 3: this time it's personal

Post by Grunnen »

The way I understand it low vowels do nasalise more easily than high vowels. Low vowels, if I recall correctly, are intrinsically slightly nasalised as a consecquence of the way our mouths are shaped.

For instance, nasalisation in French started with /a/ in the ninth century and then spread to increasingly high vowels, ending with the high vowels around the 14th century (I don't have a primary source for this, but figure 6.4 in Language Change: progress or decay (2nd edition) by Jean Aitchison)
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Re: vowel sound changes 3: this time it's personal

Post by LinguistCat »

Frislander wrote:
vampyre_smiles wrote:/a e ɛ/ raise to [æ ɛ ɪ]
I think you've mixed up your symbols, /e/ is lower than /ɛ/, so you'd expect a raising change to show /ɛ/ > /e/ not the other way round.
Thanks for catching that. You're right.
Grunnen wrote:The way I understand it low vowels do nasalise more easily than high vowels. Low vowels, if I recall correctly, are intrinsically slightly nasalised as a consecquence of the way our mouths are shaped.

For instance, nasalisation in French started with /a/ in the ninth century and then spread to increasingly high vowels, ending with the high vowels around the 14th century (I don't have a primary source for this, but figure 6.4 in Language Change: progress or decay (2nd edition) by Jean Aitchison)
Thanks for this as well. When I was looking at sound changes involving nasals originally, someone brought up or I read that non-low vowels might lower when they denasalise or at least when the distinction stops being relevant, and low vowels tend to back.
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Re: vowel sound changes 3: this time it's personal

Post by Grunnen »

vampyre_smiles wrote:
Frislander wrote:
vampyre_smiles wrote:/a e ɛ/ raise to [æ ɛ ɪ]
I think you've mixed up your symbols, /e/ is lower than /ɛ/, so you'd expect a raising change to show /ɛ/ > /e/ not the other way round.
Thanks for catching that. You're right.
Grunnen wrote:The way I understand it low vowels do nasalise more easily than high vowels. Low vowels, if I recall correctly, are intrinsically slightly nasalised as a consecquence of the way our mouths are shaped.

For instance, nasalisation in French started with /a/ in the ninth century and then spread to increasingly high vowels, ending with the high vowels around the 14th century (I don't have a primary source for this, but figure 6.4 in Language Change: progress or decay (2nd edition) by Jean Aitchison)
Thanks for this as well. When I was looking at sound changes involving nasals originally, someone brought up or I read that non-low vowels might lower when they denasalise or at least when the distinction stops being relevant, and low vowels tend to back.
I'm not aware of that being the case across the board, but French would again be an example of a language that lowers nasal vowels. On the other hand English historically nasalised sequences of vowels plus /n/ followed by fricatives, and those vowels did lengthen, but I'm not aware of lowering happening as well. Compare for instance English goose with German Gans, which have vowels following if anything the opposite pattern.
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