Sound Change Quickie Thread

[hwhatting]

5) *-os and *-om both suffered raising in Proto-Balto-Slavic under the stress

Thanks, I'll have a look at that!

[Nannalu]

I keep continuously changing the plans for the phonology of my long-loved romlang and I keep finding myself in a rut where I can't figure out how to delete final /e/ and keep final /a/ as schwa; bare in mind unstressed /o/ /u/. Any help here?

[ˈd̪ʲɛ.gɔ kɾuˑl̪]

I keep continuously changing the plans for the phonology of my long-loved romlang and I keep finding myself in a rut where I can't figure out how to delete final /e/ and keep final /a/ as schwa; bare in mind unstressed /o/ /u/. Any help here?

You could raise /e/ to /i/ along with /o/ to /u/ and then make /i/ disappear leaving palatalisation.
Is a regular and unconditional change of voiced to voiceless aspirated stops reported to have happened?

[Richard W]

Is a regular and unconditional change of voiced to voiceless aspirated stops reported to have happened?

Yes. The best known example is the Thai and Lao regional change. The change is that the voicing contrast becomes modal voice v. breathy voice, and breathiness on stops was reinterpreted as aspiration.

[Benturi]

(...) delete final /e/ and keep final /a/ as schwa; bare in mind unstressed /o/ /u/. Any help here?

I think this is what happened in Eastern Catalan.

[StrangerCoug]

Suppose syllable-initial obstruents can optionally be followed by /ʔ/ or /h/. If /Zʔ Zh/, where Z is a voiced obstruent, develop into a slack-stiff contrast /Z̬ Z̥/, then:

1. Is it plausible for /Z/ not followed by /ʔ h/ to devoice?
2. What can I do with /S Sʔ Sh/ (where S is a voiceless obstruent) besides have it become /S S’ Sʰ/?

[ˈd̪ʲɛ.gɔ kɾuˑl̪]

Suppose syllable-initial obstruents can optionally be followed by /ʔ/ or /h/. If /Zʔ Zh/, where Z is a voiced obstruent, develop into a slack-stiff contrast /Z̬ Z̥/, then:

1. Is it plausible for /Z/ not followed by /ʔ h/ to devoice?
2. What can I do with /S Sʔ Sh/ (where S is a voiceless obstruent) besides have it become /S S’ Sʰ/?

1. Well, it happened in several languages, e.g. some English speakers devoice /b/ /d/ /dʒ/ and /g/ in every position with a little exception of unstressed intervocalic environment. German devoiced it's [v] whose spelling survived in some words (I only know Vogel), so devoicing is possible even for fricatives, even in an initial position.
2. /Sʔ/: Stops: You can change it into an ejective series and then play with change of POA.
Fricatives: You can turn this sequences into ejective affricates and then either introduce affricates into your conlang or make them appear at new POA.
/Sh/: Aspirated stops, then fricatives maybe.
Fricatives: You could do something like (e.g.) /sh/ /ɧ/ or /fh/ /ɸ/ and then have a variety of directions.
/S/: You could keep it [S], but with a merger of some or all other categories I worked on before in this post into /S/ with creation of a tone system or pitch accent.
I hope it was helpful.

[Travis B.]

Suppose syllable-initial obstruents can optionally be followed by /ʔ/ or /h/. If /Zʔ Zh/, where Z is a voiced obstruent, develop into a slack-stiff contrast /Z̬ Z̥/, then:

1. Is it plausible for /Z/ not followed by /ʔ h/ to devoice?
2. What can I do with /S Sʔ Sh/ (where S is a voiceless obstruent) besides have it become /S S’ Sʰ/?

1. Well, it happened in several languages, e.g. some English speakers devoice /b/ /d/ /dʒ/ and /g/ in every position with a little exception of unstressed intervocalic environment.

You are talking about my dialect, and "some English speakers" imply that it is more widespread than that. (It may be*, but I don't know offhand.) Also, in the dialect here, to be exact, all intervocalic, not just unstressed, lenis obstruents are voiced, and (I did not make this clear) certain kinds of clusters between vowels, such as clusters with nasals and sonorants, also involve voiced lenis obstruents.

* Initial and final devoicing seem to be pretty common, but I am not so certain about word-internal devoicing.

[ˈd̪ʲɛ.gɔ kɾuˑl̪]

Suppose syllable-initial obstruents can optionally be followed by /ʔ/ or /h/. If /Zʔ Zh/, where Z is a voiced obstruent, develop into a slack-stiff contrast /Z̬ Z̥/, then:

1. Is it plausible for /Z/ not followed by /ʔ h/ to devoice?
2. What can I do with /S Sʔ Sh/ (where S is a voiceless obstruent) besides have it become /S S’ Sʰ/?

1. Well, it happened in several languages, e.g. some English speakers devoice /b/ /d/ /dʒ/ and /g/ in every position with a little exception of unstressed intervocalic environment.

You are talking about my dialect, and "some English speakers" imply that it is more widespread than that. (It may be*, but I don't know offhand.) Also, in the dialect here, to be exact, all intervocalic, not just unstressed, lenis obstruents are voiced, and (I did not make this clear) certain kinds of clusters between vowels, such as clusters with nasals and sonorants, also involve voiced lenis obstruents.

* Initial and final devoicing seem to be pretty common, but I am not so certain about word-internal devoicing.

Oh, I just didn't focus enough, I also wanted to recall the case of Thai language, said just above the beginning of this little discussion and High Germanic consonant shift, which I think happened in every position (I didn't find any exception).
I admit I based mostly on your description of your dialect and I didn't check everything about it. Maybe you should do some kind of gathering together the information about it? It would be very nice in my opinion if we had our own linguistic records, not available only for a great amount of money.

[Travis B.]

I admit I based mostly on your description of your dialect and I didn't check everything about it. Maybe you should do some kind of gathering together the information about it? It would be very nice in my opinion if we had our own linguistic records, not available only for a great amount of money.

The thing is that anything I say about how people speak around here should not be taken as being representative for how speakers of NAE speak. Anyways, a lot of it is just based off me personally observing how I myself and other people around me speak in person.

[Cedh]

Suppose syllable-initial obstruents can optionally be followed by /ʔ/ or /h/. If /Zʔ Zh/, where Z is a voiced obstruent, develop into a slack-stiff contrast /Z̬ Z̥/, then:

1. Is it plausible for /Z/ not followed by /ʔ h/ to devoice?
2. What can I do with /S Sʔ Sh/ (where S is a voiceless obstruent) besides have it become /S S’ Sʰ/?

ˈd̪ʲɛ.gɔ kɾuˑl̪ mentioned a tone system already; here's how I would personally go about that:
- vowels after Cʔ clusters become glottalized/slack/creaky and develop a low pitch.
- vowels after Ch clusters become aspirated/stiff/breathy and develop a high pitch.
- ʔ h are deleted after consonants, and the non-modally-voiced versions of vowels become secondary compared to pitch. (Tone is now phonemic.)
- Vowels after a voiced obstruent gain a low-pitched onglide, and vowels after a voiceless obstruent gain a high-pitched onglide. (This could be extended to apply after non-obstruent consonants too.)
- The voicing distinction in consonants is lost.

This creates a contour tone system along the following lines:
*da > tà (low tone) or tǎ (low-)rising tone)
*dʔa > tà (low tone)
*dha > tǎ ((high-)rising tone)
*ta > tá (high tone) or tâ ((high-)falling tone)
*tʔa > tâ ((low-)falling tone)
*tha > tá (high tone)

[StrangerCoug]

Suppose syllable-initial obstruents can optionally be followed by /ʔ/ or /h/. If /Zʔ Zh/, where Z is a voiced obstruent, develop into a slack-stiff contrast /Z̬ Z̥/, then:

1. Is it plausible for /Z/ not followed by /ʔ h/ to devoice?
2. What can I do with /S Sʔ Sh/ (where S is a voiceless obstruent) besides have it become /S S’ Sʰ/?

ˈd̪ʲɛ.gɔ kɾuˑl̪ mentioned a tone system already; here's how I would personally go about that:
- vowels after Cʔ clusters become glottalized/slack/creaky and develop a low pitch.
- vowels after Ch clusters become aspirated/stiff/breathy and develop a high pitch.
- ʔ h are deleted after consonants, and the non-modally-voiced versions of vowels become secondary compared to pitch. (Tone is now phonemic.)
- Vowels after a voiced obstruent gain a low-pitched onglide, and vowels after a voiceless obstruent gain a high-pitched onglide. (This could be extended to apply after non-obstruent consonants too.)
- The voicing distinction in consonants is lost.

This creates a contour tone system along the following lines:
*da > tà (low tone) or tǎ (low-)rising tone)
*dʔa > tà (low tone)
*dha > tǎ ((high-)rising tone)
*ta > tá (high tone) or tâ ((high-)falling tone)
*tʔa > tâ ((low-)falling tone)
*tha > tá (high tone)

I like that

[tseren]

ɬ → ç on acoustic similarity? I've generated some sporadically I want to clean it up without creating a new phoneme. /ç/ is already well established. There is /l/, but no /ʃ/. I don't see any precedent for it in the Index Diachronica, but if I recall correctly from an old post on John Wells's blog, the two are allophones for some Welsh speakers. Reasonable/not reasonable? Otherwise, I'll probably just revert to /l/.

[Cedh]

ɬ → xʲ is attested in various Nakh-Daghestanian languages, and xʲ → ç is barely even a phonetic change, so yes, it's plausible.

[Soap]

Another weird obscure question I dont know if anyone'll be able to answer and is hard to search for.

Has any language ever released suppressed tones?

By that I mean, suppose there is a langugae that has phonemic tone at the morpheme level, but allows only one high tone per word, and in words with many morphemes, only the rightmost high tone is pronounced. Thus a word like mappámensám would be pronounced /mappamensám/. If this language goes into the territory of a fully tonal people, do you think by osmosis that the people of the original language could "release" the suppressed high tones and become also fully tonal?

[ˈd̪ʲɛ.gɔ kɾuˑl̪]

I'd see in it an analogy to the final obstruent devoicing in German and Polish, which (for sure in Polish) exists for some speakers even in compounds, which must have been pronounced without this phenomenon, e.g. "poddany" [pʌt̪ˈd̪ɐ̞n̪ɘ], based on the analysis pod- [pʌt̪] + dany [ˈd̪ɐ̞n̪ɘ] (for me, personally, it is [pʌd̪ˈd̪ɐ̞n̪ɘ], as I'm used to assimilate obstruents in voice on both morpheme and word boundary). I think your idea wouldn't be too much far from this manner.

[Pole, the]

I'd see in it an analogy to the final obstruent devoicing in German and Polish, which (for sure in Polish) exists for some speakers even in compounds, which must have been pronounced without this phenomenon, e.g. "poddany" [pʌt̪ˈd̪ɐ̞n̪ɘ]

Sounds incredibly outlandish for me.

[ˈd̪ʲɛ.gɔ kɾuˑl̪]

I can't ascribe this feature to any particular social group; I can't also describe it fully understandably, but it comes from an unconscious reanalysis of morphemes and applying general final devoicing to them. Wikipedia and Wiktionary report something similar in German, like in Abbau, said to be pronounced [apˈbaʊ̯].
I emphasise it doesn't happen for any of people I know, but I sometimes hear people talking on the tram and they have it.

[hwhatting]

I can confirm that phenomenon for German, it's the Standard and also AFAIK usual in most dialects. When learning foreing languages, we Germans actually have to learn to not to devoice syllable-finally, and we also have to specifically learn to assimilate voicedness across syllable-boundaries, e.g. when learning Slavic languages.

[ˈd̪ʲɛ.gɔ kɾuˑl̪]

And can you admit you have something like glottal stop keeping syllable boundaries between words? Some Poles do have it, so that "z Anią" and "za nią" ("with Ann" and "behind her") sound different. I think I'll manage to give an audio file around 20 UTC+2.
EDIT: Finally! (a winner pose) http://vocaroo.com/i/s1g6KOSBXKCn

[hwhatting]

And can you admit you have something like glottal stop keeping syllable boundaries between words? Some Poles do have it, so that "z Anią" and "za nią" ("with Ann" and "behind her") sound different. I think I'll manage to give an audio file around 20 UTC+2.

I freely admit to that.

[Soap]

Okay thank you. The morpheme boundaries are clearly a requirement. Still, I might be able to get away with extending the process even to long single-morpheme words (which would originally consist entirely of loans) after a period of allowing multiple intonations only over morpheme boundaries. Another trick I could pull is to have a sound change that adds more tones to the already existing ones, and have this apply to certain unstressed syllables, therefore allowing more than one tone per word even in some cases where the word is just two syllables long.

[Knit Tie]

I'd like to ask this: what is the quickest way to collapse a SAE phoneme inventory inventory (so 5-7 vowels, nasals, liquids, voiced vs. voiceless fricatives and voiced vs. voiceless plosives) into something with as few distinct consonant series as possible (so something like Greenlandic, with nasals vs. fricatives vs. plosives) and a minimal vowel system?

[Cedh]

In terms of sound changes, there are probably many different ways which would take about the same amount of time. Also, the shortest way is probably not the most interesting one. That said, con-historically the quickest way to drastically reduce a phoneme inventory is likely having your speakers colonize the territory of a language with a minimalistic phonology, and let a creole develop (cf. English to Tok Pisin).

[Das Public Viewing]

So, I'm trying to make a language family along the lines of Indo-European or Afroasiatic, and I was trying to think of a couple mega-unstable phonemes for the proto-lang. Could y'all tell me which of these are plausibly unstable?

/ɬ/ the Magnificent: It is of course alongside a /l/ and a /ʎ/, but I was thinking of a satemization-type distinction between evolving it into /θ/ or /ʃ/, which then can become /f/t/s/ and /s/ʂ/x/, respectively, plus maybe others if I think of it.
PIE Dorsals Plus: This consists of the theory I've often seen lurking on the PIE threads here, of an uvular-velar-labiovelar distinction, but with an added labiouvular series/consonant/haven't decided. This set of /k/kʷ/q/qʷ/ could then become any of /c/cʷ/k/kʷ/, /k/p/kˤ/pˤ/, etc.
Gemination Constipation: There are so many things this could become! It could rhinoglottophilia! It could affricates! It could failure to lenit! etc.
Tone: Okay, this may not have any far-reaching distinction, but could tone produce differing stress patterns depending on the duaghters? Or does it produce mostly the same effect? Also, this could maybe affect vowels?