I imagine they mean "first sound change after the constructed proto-language" or something like that.Travis B. wrote:There is no such thing as a "first" sound change in a language, as languages have no single time in which they come into being.
The issue is that if a language contrasts two voiceless alveolar/dental lateral continuants, it's because one is palatalized or glottalized. Afaik, no known language contrasts /ɬ/ with /l̥/. Of course just because we don't observe something doesn't necessarily mean it couldn't exist, but you have to ask whether the acoustic difference between [ɬ] and [l̥] is salient enough for a realistic language to have them as separate phonemes in the first place.yangfiretiger121 wrote:It was one of the first sound changes in the language. The distinction lasted a year or so in the language's formative stages before collapsing into the fricative sound. What's troubling me is if they'd have preserved the <lh> spelling for these many years or changed it to <hl> sometime along the way. That question should be answered here, though.
Having /l/ allophonically devoiced in certain positions, and being reinterpreted as the phoneme /ɬ/ makes sense to me, but /l̥/ and /ɬ/ as separate phonemes does not.
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Two questions for my lang:
1. Is loss of lateralization for [ɬ] realistic - the change is [ɬ̪ˠ]→[θˠ]
2. Are /θˠ~θˤ/ and /θ/, /ɸˠ/ and /ɸ/ likely to remain stable as seperate phonemes? And if not, how might their later forms/reflexes remain distinctive?
Here's my idea of the realization of the clusters in the language:
/bl/ → [bɫ̪]
/bn/ → [bn̪]
/pl/ → [pɫ̪]
/pn/ → [pn̪]
/pʰl/ → [pɬ̪ˠ] (later → [pθˠ]) → /pθˠ/?
/pʰn/ → [pn̪̊] (later → [pθ],) → /pθ/?
(Note: /l/ [ɫ̪] contrasts with /lʲ/ [l̠ʲ])