Origin of Ejectives

[8Deer]

I wanted to make a language that derived ejectives from earlier non-ejective consonants, but I was told that this was very difficult. It got me thinking about how languages develop ejectives as a result of an areal feature. For example, how did ejectives develop in Ossetian? Is it just through borrowing of lexicon from Caucasian languages that have ejectives? Also, aren't there a couple of Austronesian languages that developed glottalized consonants (although maybe this was through combinations of C+ʔ?)?

Any answers are appreciated. Thanks in advance from someone woefully ignorant in the finer points of phonetics.

[Travis B.]

Umm... one example of a language that has developed ejectives from non-ejectives is, umm, English, or at least many dialects thereof.

In that case of English it is a matter of preglottalized final fortis plosives being held and then forcefully released as ejectives, analogous to them being aspirated were there not preglottalized.

This is allophonic, of course, but it does show a clear route to ejectives from non-ejectives.

[8Deer]

Umm... one example of a language that has developed ejectives from non-ejectives is, umm, English, or at least many dialects thereof.

In that case of English it is a matter of preglottalized final fortis plosives being held and then forcefully released as ejectives, analogous to them being aspirated were there not preglottalized.

This is allophonic, of course, but it does show a clear route to ejectives from non-ejectives.

Hmm, I've never considered that. That might be doable thanks.

[brandrinn]

Umm... one example of a language that has developed ejectives from non-ejectives is, umm, English, or at least many dialects thereof.

In that case of English it is a matter of preglottalized final fortis plosives being held and then forcefully released as ejectives, analogous to them being aspirated were there not preglottalized.

This is allophonic, of course, but it does show a clear route to ejectives from non-ejectives.

Hmm, I've never considered that. That might be doable thanks.

I would stick to sound changes that actually are true, but whatever.

Either way,
I don't know why you're so put off by the formation of ejectives without borrowing them. It happens all the time. In Korean, for example, they derive from consonant clusters.

[Travis B.]

I would stick to sound changes that actually are true, but whatever.

Umm, what do you mean here?

If you are referring to said change in various English varieties, just because they do not occur in the English you personally speak...

[8Deer]

Umm... one example of a language that has developed ejectives from non-ejectives is, umm, English, or at least many dialects thereof.

In that case of English it is a matter of preglottalized final fortis plosives being held and then forcefully released as ejectives, analogous to them being aspirated were there not preglottalized.

This is allophonic, of course, but it does show a clear route to ejectives from non-ejectives.

Hmm, I've never considered that. That might be doable thanks.

I would stick to sound changes that actually are true, but whatever.

Either way,
I don't know why you're so put off by the formation of ejectives without borrowing them. It happens all the time. In Korean, for example, they derive from consonant clusters.

But Korean doesn't have ejectives does it?

[AnTeallach]

If anyone doesn't believe Travis on ejectives in English, will you believe John Wells?

http://phonetic-blog.blogspot.com/2011/ ... glish.html

[Bristel]

If anyone doesn't believe Travis on ejectives in English, will you believe John Wells?

http://phonetic-blog.blogspot.com/2011/ ... glish.html

Oh I've never noticed that in anyone's speech before... That's really cool!

[ol bofosh]

I think I might have what's on that blog (can't see the Youtube, not on broadband).

If I say "I think that", then the "k" and "t" come out similar, though slightly different. I know I have a glottal stop, my girlfriend often makes fun of me when I say "butter" in a colloquial way.

Fascinating stuff!

[sirdanilot]

The word-final ejectives occur only in prepausal position, and are thus not very likely to produce a productive sound change anywhere in the near future. Nobody says 'think again' with an ejective /k/. except if you put an artificial pause between the two words. It's a bit like the word final schwa that sometimes follows word-final voiced stops in prepausal position. "bed[ə]".

There are some Dutch dialects in which this is productive, even non-prepausally (mostly West-Flemish and Zeelandic-Flemish); these dialects do that instead of final devoicing. English, however, manages just fine without either.

It does show, though, that it is not impossible for ejectives to be generated out of a system without any ejectives; it is still, however, quite hard to pull off as evolution into more marked segments requires very specific circumstances.

[Bristel]

So, does that mean there are ejective phonemes, or are they all considered allophones?

Well, I admit I don't completely understand phoneme versus allophone myself...

[Herr Dunkel]

So, does that mean there are ejective phonemes, or are they all considered allophones?

Well, I admit I don't completely understand phoneme versus allophone myself...

Allophones are phones that share a phoneme.
Phonemes are what we hear and think we're making, phones are what we are making, and allophones what it sounds like in certain enviroments

[Travis B.]

Oh I've never noticed that in anyone's speech before... That's really cool!

I suspect most people mistaken ejectives in English for being aspirated myself.

[Whimemsz]

So, does that mean there are ejective phonemes, or are they all considered allophones?

Well, I admit I don't completely understand phoneme versus allophone myself... :oops:

They're allophones, because they're in complementary distribution with other realizations of /p t k/ (only occuring prepausally, as sirdanilot mentioned). Although actually, they're still optional in that position (unlike, e.g., the aspirating of /p t k/ in some positions). But anyway, they're not phonemes in English.

It does show, though, that it is not impossible for ejectives to be generated out of a system without any ejectives; it is still, however, quite hard to pull off as evolution into more marked segments requires very specific circumstances.

I agree it's unlikely for English to evolve ejectives by this route any time soon. But as you say, it certainly gives a conlanger enough to work with in devising a way to evolve ejectives essentially from scratch. And if your language is in an area where ejectives are common, it's far more likely to acquire them, either through borrowing or a new sound change or both.

[Miekko]

So, does that mean there are ejective phonemes, or are they all considered allophones?

Well, I admit I don't completely understand phoneme versus allophone myself...

Allophones are phones that share a phoneme.
Phonemes are what we hear and think we're making, phones are what we are making, and allophones what it sounds like in certain enviroments

Allophones are what we are making as well. What it sounds like has nothing to do with it. For a phone that makes sense in a language, it is the case that that phone is an allophone of some phoneme.

[Herr Dunkel]

So, does that mean there are ejective phonemes, or are they all considered allophones?

Well, I admit I don't completely understand phoneme versus allophone myself...

Allophones are phones that share a phoneme.
Phonemes are what we hear and think we're making, phones are what we are making, and allophones what it sounds like in certain enviroments

Allophones are what we are making as well. What it sounds like has nothing to do with it. For a phone that makes sense in a language, it is the case that that phone is an allophone of some phoneme.

Well, phones are allophones, too... I have rushed the description, though.

[Travis B.]

The word-final ejectives occur only in prepausal position, and are thus not very likely to produce a productive sound change anywhere in the near future. Nobody says 'think again' with an ejective /k/. except if you put an artificial pause between the two words. It's a bit like the word final schwa that sometimes follows word-final voiced stops in prepausal position. "bed[ə]".

There are some Dutch dialects in which this is productive, even non-prepausally (mostly West-Flemish and Zeelandic-Flemish); these dialects do that instead of final devoicing. English, however, manages just fine without either.

Just for some clarification, English does in many varieties have allophonic final devoicing when not before a vowel (and in at least some sometimes even then).

However, this differs from final devoicing in Low Franconian, High German (excepting the parts without it), and Low German, in that finally devoiced lenis consonants do not merge with their fortis counterparts, and that devoicing is generally suppressed by a following vowel. Particularly, allophonic effects upon preceding vowels are preserved, devoiced plosives remain unpreglottalized, and in most dialects devoiced obstruents remain lenis with the common exception of the final fortition of /d/.

Probably the most obvious case of this is that many people pronounce final /d/ as unpreglottalized [t], which is distinguished from /t/, pronounced as [ʔ] or preglottalized [t].

The details do vary from dialect to dialect, however. My dialect and many other dialects from the same area, for instance, have the feature (except in more careful or conservative speech) that all final fricatives and affricatives undergo fortition when they are finally devoiced, and also optionally allows for final fortition of all stops (rather than just /d/). This makes it have final fortition in a manner more like in continental West Germanic varieties, even though there are still significant differences therefrom.

[Gojera]

I had a quick conlang sketch a few months ago that developed ejectives, although they weren't part of the normal inventory. I actually didn't know how to produce ejectives, but I learned how to do it with this sketch.

What happened was basically that it had normal pulmonic stops, as well as a glottal stop, which was a normal consonant. It had "biliteral" CVCV roots that shifted around to indicate number: eŋat "one eye"; ŋeda "a pair of eyes"; uzat "a person"; suda "two people". The cases were marked by postpositions that generally consisted of a glottal stop followed by a short vowel. 'i marked the locative, 'o the nominative.

So you'd say ŋeda'i, "at/in the (two) eyes", but eŋat'i "at/in the (one) eye". The easiest way to realize the latter was with an ejective.

I doubt that's very naturalistic; it was a complete accident, I was mostly playing around with grammatical number.

[Gojera]

So, as a consequence of that, I tried to derive ejectives by snuggling a glottal stop up against a pulmonic stop.

I started with a very simple phonology of normal pulmonic consonants and simple CV phonotactics. Then I'd debuccalize intervocalic /t/. Then delete, say, /u/ before a glottal stop. Which means that a word that started off as /kuti/ would end up as /k'i/, realized with an ejective.

Again, I don't know enough about phonetics or diachronic linguistics to say if this is at all plausible. But it worked well enough in the conlang sketch!

[Trebor]

I wanted to make a language that derived ejectives from earlier non-ejective consonants, but I was told that this was very difficult. It got me thinking about how languages develop ejectives as a result of an areal feature. For example, how did ejectives develop in Ossetian? Is it just through borrowing of lexicon from Caucasian languages that have ejectives? Also, aren't there a couple of Austronesian languages that developed glottalized consonants (although maybe this was through combinations of C+ʔ?)?

Any answers are appreciated. Thanks in advance from someone woefully ignorant in the finer points of phonetics.

I'd be interested to know whether (1) geminate consonants can turn into ejectives in the same language, or (2) words with geminate consonants in one can be reanalyzed as if they had non-geminate ejective consonants while being borrowed into another language.

[Nortaneous]

Evidence for diachronic fusion of obstruent – glottal stop sequences is harder to come by, though oblique reference to C÷ sequences being the historical source of ejective consonants is made from time to time in the literature (e.g. Greenberg 1970). Fusion is posited as the origin of ejective stops in Washo (Jacobsen 1977), Nitinaht and Makah (Jacobsen 1969), Alaskan Haida (Levine 1981), Southern Pomo (McLendon 1973, 1976), Caddo (Chafe 1976), Hausa (Skinner 1975), and Circassian (Colarusso 1989). According to Blust (1980), glottalized consonants in Yapese (including ejective stops) seem to have arisen from a process collapsing *CVC syllables first to *CC clusters and then to C’. Of particular interest here are some examples involving *tVq sequences:
*bu(r)teq > buut’
*mataqu > mat’aaw
*taqi > t’aay

Source: a paper on the development of ejective fricatives in a language with ejective fricatives but no ejective stops

[Trebor]

Evidence for diachronic fusion of obstruent – glottal stop sequences is harder to come by, though oblique reference to C÷ sequences being the historical source of ejective consonants is made from time to time in the literature (e.g. Greenberg 1970). Fusion is posited as the origin of ejective stops in Washo (Jacobsen 1977), Nitinaht and Makah (Jacobsen 1969), Alaskan Haida (Levine 1981), Southern Pomo (McLendon 1973, 1976), Caddo (Chafe 1976), Hausa (Skinner 1975), and Circassian (Colarusso 1989). According to Blust (1980), glottalized consonants in Yapese (including ejective stops) seem to have arisen from a process collapsing *CVC syllables first to *CC clusters and then to C’. Of particular interest here are some examples involving *tVq sequences:
*bu(r)teq > buut’
*mataqu > mat’aaw
*taqi > t’aay

Source: a paper on the development of ejective fricatives in a language with ejective fricatives but no ejective stops

Thanks for that excerpt and the link. So, if we have the Finnish word /lAk:Aut:A:/ <lakkauttaa>, I can plausibly have my conlang, Kosi, borrow it as /lak_>aut_>a/ <lak'aut'a>?

[Nortaneous]

That's not C: > C’, that's Cʔ > C’. The source is ambiguous, but it looks like ejectives in Yapese come only from fusions of Cq clusters, and q > ʔ occurred in most of Austronesian.

[Trebor]

That's not C: > C’, that's Cʔ > C’. The source is ambiguous, but it looks like ejectives in Yapese come only from fusions of Cq clusters, and q > ʔ occurred in most of Austronesian.

Damn, there goes my cool idea. So, it's more likely to have /lak:aut/ turn into /lakauta/ or something else?

[Pole, the]

But couldn't it go as: Cː > CC, then C > ʔ / _C (maybe _# as well) and finally ʔC > Cʼ?