Bizarre Sound Changes

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Rekettye
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Re: Bizarre Sound Changes

Post by Rekettye »

Elector Dark wrote:English ɡenerally has [ɻ] or [ɹ] while some dialects have [ʁ]
Which English dialects have [ʁ]???? [ɔzɛʁ zan fʁɛnʃ pipɔl]???
Low Pr. kalbeken < Lith. kalbėti
Lith. sūris = cheese, Fr. souris = mouse... o_O

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Re: Bizarre Sound Changes

Post by L'alphabētarium »

Rekettye wrote:
Elector Dark wrote:English ɡenerally has [ɻ] or [ɹ] while some dialects have [ʁ]
Which English dialects have [ʁ]???? [ɔzɛʁ zan fʁɛnʃ pipɔl]???
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northumbrian_Burr
It's apparently somewhat out-dated and pretty rare, though...

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Re: Bizarre Sound Changes

Post by TaylorS »

Soap wrote:
NYC English bird > boid!
Isnt it really just /ɜɪ/, though? Ive only heard the full-blown /ɔɪ/ in cartoons and other mock accents.
I swear I've heard it come out of Regis Philbun's mouth.

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Re: Bizarre Sound Changes

Post by ---- »

Most of the sound changes that occurred from PR to Ogami are fairly basic, but a couple of them are pretty spectacular. The results of the vowel devoicing stuff are especially fun. We end up getting this set of changes (among similar others, but they're sorta complicated and I'm not sure I can write them correctly in the formal style):
ku > fu
i, u > ɯ
ɯ > s (when not adjacent to any voiced phonemes)
s > f /_f,f_
degemination of moraic s/f occurs here I think (unconditionally?).
and then there it is again:
t > k /_{s, f}
with the added bonus that k isn't lost in that position!

Cr > C: is pretty cool imo too (cf. Og. ssu v. Jp. shiro) but I dunno if that's actually so great.

EDIT: the cognate of Japanese hajime is pakɯmi so maybe the change actually occurred before fricativization of ɯ.
EDITT: yeah I'm 90% sure it was t > k/_ɯ

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Re: Bizarre Sound Changes

Post by Nortaneous »

and o > u, giving a vowel system of /a e i ɯ u/
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Re: Bizarre Sound Changes

Post by ---- »

The distribution of /e/ in the language is really weird. It's muuuch rarer than other vowels. So much so that my examination of all the lexical items I could find hasn't given me a very satisfying idea of where it came from (there's probably some document somewhere that talks about Miyako diachronics but hell if I can find it). But at least some cases of it come from *ya; cf. the name of the language:
*miyako >> meeku
and there's a suffix -teen that I think would be cognate to -(*)chan in Japanese.

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Re: Bizarre Sound Changes

Post by vokzhen »

Jicarilla is Southern Athabascan language, and like most has a stop inventory of /t ts tɬ tʃ k/, each plain, aspirated, and ejective, plus /p kʷ kʷʰ/. It apparently has a near-complete merger of tʰ > kʰ, without a loss of original kʰ triggering it as happened in Austronesian languages.

Some Slavey dialects took the original /t̪θ t̪θʰ t̪θ' θ ð/ and did weird things. One fronted them to /p pʰ p' f v/, one labiovelarized them to /kʷ kʷʰ kʷ' hʷ w/ (my unsupported guess would be via t̪f or t̪ʷ), and one mixed the two with /kʷ f ʔw f w/.

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Re: Bizarre Sound Changes

Post by ---- »

Maybe sort of weird: Wuvulu had k > 0, t > ʔ, and then s > t and r > x. I guess these sound changes aren't totally spectacular, but the results are fun: the stop inventory is /b p t ʔ/.

(in the small consonant inventories thread, gach reports an inventory of /b p t ʔ m n f h r l w j/ but Blust claims that /j/ is not phonemic and /r/ certainly isn't).

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Re: Bizarre Sound Changes

Post by ---- »

Here's a fun one: you know the fairly common change θ > f? the Shark Bay language of Vanuatu has the opposite: POC *p > θ before unrounded vowels. It also had m > n and ⁿb > t.

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Re: Bizarre Sound Changes

Post by vokzhen »

Ik (Kuliak, Niho-Saharan?) lost their laterals: /ɬ/ > [ʃ], which isn't strange, but /ɮ/ > [ɦʲ-,-ʒ-] and /tɬ'/ > [ʄ]. And children are apparently starting to take /ts'/ > [ʄ] as well.

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Re: Bizarre Sound Changes

Post by Nortaneous »

thetha wrote:Here's a fun one: you know the fairly common change θ > f? the Shark Bay language of Vanuatu has the opposite: POC *p > θ before unrounded vowels. It also had m > n and ⁿb > t.
By way of palatalization of bilabials to linguolabials?
vokzhen wrote:Ik (Kuliak, Niho-Saharan?) lost their laterals: /ɬ/ > [ʃ], which isn't strange, but /ɮ/ > [ɦʲ-,-ʒ-] and /tɬ'/ > [ʄ]. And children are apparently starting to take /ts'/ > [ʄ] as well.
There's close to the reverse in some Austro-Asiatic languages: *s is unstable and often becomes h (unremarkable) or θ (unremarkable in that part of the world; cf. Bashkir and Zhuang), but in a few languages it becomes ɬ. (And in Kri it splits and becomes either r̥ or j̥.)
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Re: Bizarre Sound Changes

Post by ---- »

‮suoenatroN wrote:
thetha wrote:Here's a fun one: you know the fairly common change θ > f? the Shark Bay language of Vanuatu has the opposite: POC *p > θ before unrounded vowels. It also had m > n and ⁿb > t.
By way of palatalization of bilabials to linguolabials?
yep, exactly.

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Re: Bizarre Sound Changes

Post by Nortaneous »

03:03 < nort> mundari nasal release only occurs in monosyllables
03:03 < nort> /ub/ [u?bm] but /udub/ [udu?b]
03:24 <@vlad> southeastern tepehuan also has b > ?m word-finally but not just in monosyllables
03:24 <@vlad> and I thought that was weird
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Re: Bizarre Sound Changes

Post by Nortaneous »

To all the people who keep asking if palatals can turn to velars: some Formosan languages had PAn *j (which was /ɲ/) > dʑ > g. But they didn't have tɕ, and the one language where it was unconditional (as opposed to a partial merger of *j and *g) first had *g > k.
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nää džunnfin kukuch vklaivei sivei tåd.
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Re: Bizarre Sound Changes

Post by ---- »

l > tʃ in Anejom, in the environment of front vowels (e.g. *tolu > *teli > e-setʃ). That's a pretty odd reflex for palatalization of L.

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Re: Bizarre Sound Changes

Post by Raholeun »

‮suoenatroN wrote:To all the people who keep asking if palatals can turn to velars: some Formosan languages had PAn *j (which was /ɲ/) > dʑ > g. But they didn't have tɕ, and the one language where it was unconditional (as opposed to a partial merger of *j and *g) first had *g > k.
Blust (2009) reconstructs *j as "a palatalised voiced velar stop". I always took it for a ɣʲ.
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Re: Bizarre Sound Changes

Post by vokzhen »

Raholeun wrote:Blust (2009) reconstructs *j as "a palatalised voiced velar stop". I always took it for a ɣʲ.
With maybe one or two exceptions, it's coronal except in a single branch (Malayo-Polynesian), and even most of that branch has a coronal. Many Formosan languages reflect it as a sonorant /r l n/. I can buy /ɲ/ (or especially ȵ/n̠ʲ) for that outcome much more than a palatalized velar. With my very amateur eye, just glancing at Wikipedia's list of correspondances I'd say something like /ð/ is pretty likely too, it changes into various coronal sonorants, fricatives, and /d/ very easily and can explain the few rogue velar outcomes via an Irish-like ð>ɣ.

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Re: Bizarre Sound Changes

Post by Nortaneous »

Yeah, I could believe /D/ for *j. And maybe /5/ for *R? I wonder what the d1 d2 d3 stuff is about -- could PAn have had a dental/alveolar contrast?
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Re: Bizarre Sound Changes

Post by Porphyrogenitos »

thetha wrote:l > tʃ in Anejom, in the environment of front vowels (e.g. *tolu > *teli > e-setʃ). That's a pretty odd reflex for palatalization of L.
Well, a lot of Spanish dialects have /ɟʝ/, /dʒ/, /ʒ/, or /ʃ/ for historical /ʎ/, thanks to yeísmo.

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Re: Bizarre Sound Changes

Post by ---- »

I think what kind of throws it for a loop in the case of Anejom is that there was already a /j/ phoneme at any possible time when the l palatalization could have occurred, so it would have had to go directly from [l~ʎ] to something along the lines of [dʒ] or else it would have dragged the /j/ with it (which didn't happen). That's not terribly weird but if you include all the intermediates not a lot of things remain weird.

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Re: Bizarre Sound Changes

Post by linguoboy »

Porphyrogenitos wrote:
thetha wrote:l > tʃ in Anejom, in the environment of front vowels (e.g. *tolu > *teli > e-setʃ). That's a pretty odd reflex for palatalization of L.
Well, a lot of Spanish dialects have /ɟʝ/, /dʒ/, /ʒ/, or /ʃ/ for historical /ʎ/, thanks to yeísmo.
I don't know if you were including Asturian among those "Spanish dialects", but it even has some voiceless affricated variants:
In Asturian, two digraphs (Ḷḷ, minuscule: ḷḷ) are used to represent some western dialectal phonemes corresponding to standard ll (representing a palatal lateral approximant [ʎ]). Among this group of dialectal pronunciations, usually called che vaqueira, can appear basically: a voiced retroflex plosive [ɖ], a voiced retroflex affricate [dʐ], a voiceless retroflex affricate [tʂ] and a voiceless alveolar affricate [t͡s].

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Re: Bizarre Sound Changes

Post by Pabappa »

L'alphabētarium wrote:
Rekettye wrote:
Elector Dark wrote:English ɡenerally has [ɻ] or [ɹ] while some dialects have [ʁ]
Which English dialects have [ʁ]???? [ɔzɛʁ zan fʁɛnʃ pipɔl]???
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northumbrian_Burr
It's apparently somewhat out-dated and pretty rare, though...
Someone posted on here a long time ago a link that showed that in some American dialects the /l/ is in fact shifting to uvular R in some poisitons. Its just an allophone, and /l/ is a very flexible consonant, so they still have [l], they just also have [R]. I do it myself on purpose most of the time, I have to admit, because it "feels right". e.g. /lORipOp/ for "lollipop". Basically all dark /l/ becomes [R]. One of the few downsides of having 600 conlangs to maintain without knowing a single real-world language other than my native.
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Re: Bizarre Sound Changes

Post by Nortaneous »

Proto-Kuki-Chin *dz- > Mizo f-
SoapBubbles wrote:Someone posted on here a long time ago a link that showed that in some American dialects the /l/ is in fact shifting to uvular R in some poisitons. Its just an allophone, and /l/ is a very flexible consonant, so they still have [l], they just also have [R]. I do it myself on purpose most of the time, I have to admit, because it "feels right". e.g. /lORipOp/ for "lollipop". Basically all dark /l/ becomes [R]. One of the few downsides of having 600 conlangs to maintain without knowing a single real-world language other than my native.
Tom Brokaw does this, doesn't he?
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Re: Bizarre Sound Changes

Post by ---- »

The Mizo sound change has a nice comparison with the set of changes that happened in several northern Athabaskan languages. The set of phonemes *s *tsʰ *ts' *z *ts shifted to *θ *tθʰ *tθ' *ð *tθ and then went kind of wacky from there. Dogrib has them as xʷ kʷʰ kʷʼ w kʷ and Hare has them as f f ʔw w kʷ.

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Re: Bizarre Sound Changes

Post by Vijay »

There's this set of sound changes in Dravidian languages that I've been wondering about for a while now involving nasals. I'm not even sure what the exact progression of the change was, but I get the impression that it went something like this:

*nr > ndr > nd (> nd̪?) > n̪d̪ > n̪n̪ > nn

In particular, the part that always looked kind of weird to me was nd > nd̪. I've never really been sure why the [d] would just suddenly become dental.

Here's an example: In Centhamil, the "formal" variety of Tamil traditionally used for literature, the word for 'pig' is written பன்றி, which suggests the pronunciation [ˈpənri] but is pronounced more like [ˈpəndri] in practice.

In Kannada, which split off from Tamil relatively early, the word for 'pig' is ಪಂದಿ, so something like [ˈpən̪d̪i].

In Malayalam, which split off only much later, the word for 'pig' is പന്നി [ˈpən̪n̪i].

But in the variety of Tamil spoken in Madurai (which is the only colloquial variety of Tamil that I'm specifically familiar with at all, really), the word for 'pig' is பன்னி, so something like [ˈpənni].

A bit off-topic, but another thing that I always found ironic is that in Tamil, dental and alveolar nasals are allophones of the same phoneme, but there are different symbols for them (ந [n̪a] vs. ன [na]). Yet in Malayalam, they contrast, but they're written with the same symbol (ന).

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