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Yeah, I mean /p/ or /b/ undergoing a change into /t/ or /d/. Attested?

There have been cases of /p/ palatalizing to /c/ around front vowels (Tsakonian), but I'm not sure about this. What are the diachronics behind linguolabials? Because I think I remember reading something once about how they were formed in some language from labials around front vowels, and they'd be a plausible intermediate for a /p/ > /t/ shift.

I'll have to consult the IPA chart again, I don't recognize /c/.

palatal stop

oh, i guess that's something you could do: p > c / _[+front], c > tS > ts > t

That looks like four phases of sound changes. Definately not something that would happen "over night".

/ts/ is, crap, I ought to know this one.

Curan Roshac wrote:That looks like four phases of sound changes. Definately not something that would happen "over night".

Definitely not. It'd probably take several centuries to complete; I think that's how long the Slavic /k/ > /ts/ palatalization took, anyway. But as long as it doesn't katamari up any existing phonemes along the way, you could probably just leave it as one line in your sound change file and be done with it.

/ts/ is, crap, I ought to know this one.

Voiceless alveolar affricate.

Nortaneous wrote:

Curan Roshac wrote:That looks like four phases of sound changes. Definately not something that would happen "over night".

Definitely not. It'd probably take several centuries to complete; I think that's how long the Slavic /k/ > /ts/ palatalization took, anyway. But as long as it doesn't katamari up any existing phonemes along the way, you could probably just leave it as one line in your sound change file and be done with it.

/ts/ is, crap, I ought to know this one.

Voiceless alveolar affricate.

Not the "Ch" in the name Che? Sorry, I'm still learning the IPA.

I'm not ɘntirɘly surɘ what you think you're doing.

Nortaneous wrote:I'm not ɘntirɘly surɘ what you think you're doing.

Eh? That is a vowel, we were speaking about consonants.

somehow i doubt you're being serious, considering you've been here for like a year, but it's like 4am so fuck i don't even know anymore

also there is absolutely nothing related to the ipa in your post history as far as i can tell so

Burana (the drug) is called /turAnA/ in some Finnish dialects.

Linguolabials are known in a few languages of the South Pacific whose speakers (or at least adult males) had a habit of removing their front teeth. The labials turned in to linguolabials before front vowels in some words. I think that's about it.

I've been wanting to get a list of ways to make more /t/ for a while, as most of my conlangs seem to be very thirsty for it. In Kuroras I made the unwise change of /p b t d/ > /r/, and now I need a way to get back at least the /t/. /p/ > /c/ > /t/ would work, if /c/ > /t/ is attested, though when I asked on IRC the people who responded could only think of pidgin languages for examples of /c/ > /t/.

Another possibility, and one that might have a greater chance of occurring unconditionally, would be /p/ > /f/ > /T/ > /t/, but again I'm not sure how many examples of /T/ > /t/ there are outside of places where speakers of one language have ended up speaking another. German and Dutch have /T/ > /d/, which is close enough, I suppose.

More info and a stepwise summary of the change:

* p > f (Arabic, possibly various other Semitic languages as well depending on whether or not you want to construct /p/ for proto-Afro-Asiatic or not)
* f > T (To be honest, I can't think of a single example of this, but it's one of those changes that just feels right)
* T > t (As mentioned above, this is pretty rare, but a similar change seems to have occurred in German and Dutch, and as a plus, it occurred at a stage of the language in which there was no real dearth of alveolar/dental stops, so it doesn't feel like it was "forced" to me)

p > c > t looks less likely to me, despite its shorter length, because you're making two huge jumps through the teeth with no intermediates.

/T/ > /t/ happens in most North Germanic varieties that aren't Icelandic, by the way, although I don't think any North Germanic variety has /T/ > /t/ in all cases (Faroese has some /T/ > /h/, most Scandinavian dialects have some /T/ > /d/).

Soap wrote:* f > T (To be honest, I can't think of a single example of this, but it's one of those changes that just feels right)

Feels pretty iffy to me. The other way around is normal and attested, but this... T is pretty rare, f is not. I just don't see a reason for it.

Ulrike Meinhof wrote:

Soap wrote:* f > T (To be honest, I can't think of a single example of this, but it's one of those changes that just feels right)

Feels pretty iffy to me. The other way around is normal and attested, but this... T is pretty rare, f is not. I just don't see a reason for it.

Well, a lot of languages with s > T seem to do it as part of a push chain. E.g. S > s, with pre-existing s moving out of the way to avoid a merger.

It might be more natural that way. Generate some new f from somewhere, and then existing f can be pushed out of the way.

I was actually thinking that f > T could occur in a language in which a new fʷ has just arisen, presumably from h + w or some similar sequence, with the f > T change happening to make it more distinct from fʷ. I've actually done this shift in Moonshine, but Moonshine had a whole series of labialized consonants to go with it.

f > θ is pretty reasonable.

I've seen f θ t posited for an Oceanic language (Fijian IIRC?)

Magb wrote:/T/ > /t/ happens in most North Germanic varieties that aren't Icelandic, by the way, although I don't think any North Germanic variety has /T/ > /t/ in all cases (Faroese has some /T/ > /h/, most Scandinavian dialects have some /T/ > /d/).

The Scandinavian/German thing isn't really θ d directly as much as θ ð d (cf. s z in German). Or more exactly, θ ð̥ d̥.

How about p tʷ t? A pre-existing /tʷ/ might be realized as /tp͡/ (as in Ubykh) to help motivate the 1st merger.

f → θ happens sometimes as the result of hypercorrection in th-fronting dialects of english, although that's a pretty specific set of circumstances.

θ → t happens in southern Irish English. Duh.

Also wasn't the german/dutch one ð → d? this makes more sense to me. (eg words like ðə in english are də in dutch, ði:z in english is di:zɐ in german, etc) and you've also got *θ → t as in 'vater', 'mutter' in german.

finlay wrote:Also wasn't the german/dutch one ð → d? this makes more sense to me. (eg words like ðə in english are də in dutch, ði:z in english is di:zɐ in german, etc) and you've also got *θ → t as in 'vater', 'mutter' in german.

What happened in West Germanic outside Anglic was West Germanic /θ/ > [ð] > /d/, completing after the High German Consonant Shift; in some High German varieties this did merge in turn with /t/ from West Germanic /d/, but this did not happen in Standard German. Standard German Vater and Mutter are not examples of this, as they reflect West Germanic /d/ > /t/; contrast them with Standard German Bruder, which does reflect West Germanic /θ/.

Also note that the /ð/ found in modern English father and mother actually does not come from West Germanic /θ/ but rather of a later change in Middle English of /dər/ > /ðər/ in certain words, also shown by pairs like English weather versus Standard German Wetter and Standard Dutch weer (which reflects the elision or lenition of intervocalic /d/ in places in Low Franconian). Likewise, the presence of /θ/ in Old Norse faðir and móðir reflects the development of Proto-Germanic /d/ in certain positions in Proto-Norse.

c > t is assumed for most Austronesian (Proto-Malayo-Polynesian and a few others), with a c > ʈ variation for Tai-Kadai. c (or an affricate) > t is attested for Ancient Egyptian, Egyptologically expressed as t̲ > t. The Ancient Egyptian t̲ seems to have started as a palatalised allophone of /k/.

There was a Czech dialect change pʲ > tʲ.

According to Wikipedia the 'c' youre talking about was actually 'C' which is pronounced /ts/. And unlike many Wikipedia articles this one is written by experts. But there's still a lot of guesswork involved in reconstructing proto-Austronesian, and they may be wrong about the values of some of the consonants. In any case, tS > ts is attested elsewhere. That actually helps me a lot, since I've been looking for a way to generate /t/ in a few languages that have plenty of /tS/. k > tS > ts > t while kʷ > k, with both changes unconditional, should work quite nicely.

Soap wrote:In any case, tS > ts is attested elsewhere. That actually helps me a lot, since I've been looking for a way to generate /t/ in a few languages that have plenty of /tS/.

Baltic Finnic has tʃ t directly (*ts remains, might have still been palatalized *tsʲ back then however). This is also found in most of Samoyedic (but could have gone thru *ts there).

I thought it was generally reconstructed as tʲ > t. Sorry to be so picky.

Soap wrote:I thought it was generally reconstructed as tʲ > t. Sorry to be so picky.

I've only seen [tʲ] ever suggested for *ć (usually taken as [tsʲ] or [tɕ] or [c]), which *ts. *č certainly wasn't palatalized. In theory it could have been [ts], but all langs that don't shift ʃ s (and some that do, like Hungarian) have [tʃ].