Effects of consonants on adjacent vowels (and vice-versa)

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spats
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Effects of consonants on adjacent vowels (and vice-versa)

Post by spats »

Something that came up in the French thread was how backwards jod ejection could cross multiple consonants. And that made me think of the huge number of possible conditioned sound changes that can happen in natural language and how when we conlang diachronically we tend to focus on sound changes from languages we're familiar with.

I'd like to branch out a little and learn about some of the more unusual conditioned sound changes and why they happen. What are the most common but unfamiliar/non-obvious sound changes that you can think of? To narrow it down, let's focus only on sound changes caused by a class of neighboring consonants (for vowels) or vowels (for consonants).

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Re: Effects of consonants on adjacent vowels (and vice-versa

Post by Legion »

Another one from French is how nasalization interferred with the developpement of diphthongs:

O > uo > ue > 9 > 2 (focum > fOk > f2)
but
On > uo~n > O~n > O~ or On (bonum, bonam > bOn, bOna > bO~, bOn)

ei > oi > we > wa or E (regem > rei > Rwa)
but
ein > ei~n > E~ or En (reginam > reina > REn)

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Re: Effects of consonants on adjacent vowels (and vice-versa

Post by Basilius »

One of my favorite examples is wood in English.

It's cognate with Old High German witu, and in certain MSS it is spelled widu in Old English, which seems to be the original form. Then in most dialects of OE i was changed to io before an alveolar followed by a back vowel, to produce another attested spelling, wiodu. Still later, io was changed to /u/ after w. Judging from the spelling, this /u/ was then lengthened to /oː/ in Middle English - a change that doesn't seem to regularly happen before voiceless obstruents; and in the end, the vowel (probably narrowed to /uː/ by that time, but that was boring) was shortened to /ʊ/, which was a semi-regular process before final stops.
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Re: Effects of consonants on adjacent vowels (and vice-versa

Post by Qwynegold »

This is a good thread idea, I've been wondering about this stuff too. I hope others will add more examples...
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Re: Effects of consonants on adjacent vowels (and vice-versa

Post by Nortaneous »

Basilius wrote:One of my favorite examples is wood in English.

It's cognate with Old High German witu, and in certain MSS it is spelled widu in Old English, which seems to be the original form. Then in most dialects of OE i was changed to io before an alveolar followed by a back vowel, to produce another attested spelling, wiodu. Still later, io was changed to /u/ after w. Judging from the spelling, this /u/ was then lengthened to /oː/ in Middle English - a change that doesn't seem to regularly happen before voiceless obstruents; and in the end, the vowel (probably narrowed to /uː/ by that time, but that was boring) was shortened to /ʊ/, which was a semi-regular process before final stops.
Oh, English is full of things like that. For example:
The origin of the split is the unrounding of /ʊ/ in Early Modern English, resulting in the phoneme /ʌ/. In general (though with some exceptions), this unrounding did not occur if /ʊ/ was preceded by a labial consonant (e.g., /p/, /f/, /b/) and followed by /l/, /ʃ/, or /tʃ/, leaving the modern /ʊ/.
And there were all sorts of fun things around vowel breaking in Old English, but I can't be bothered to look that up right now.
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Re: Effects of consonants on adjacent vowels (and vice-versa

Post by LoneWolf »

Well I remember reading that alveolar or dental consonants have a tendency to front adjacent back vowels (e.g.: the word [tut] might become [tyt]) and vice-versa that velar consonants pull front vowels to the back region. All of this is pretty obvious and logical when you think about it. Alveolar and dental consonants are articulated in a region of the mouth that is close to where front vowels are made. Likewise velar consonants are articulated in the same area of the mouth as back vowels.

You might also want to read this excellent wikipedia article on the phonetic realisation of vowels in Irish http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_phonology#Vowels
"Brothers will battle to bloody end,
and sisters' sons their sib betray;
woe's in the world, much wantonness;
axe-age, sword-age, cloven shields,
wind-age, wolf-age, ere the world crumbles;
will the spear of no man spare the other."
-->Voluspa

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Re: Effects of consonants on adjacent vowels (and vice-versa

Post by alice »

Here's a pertinent question which popped into my head. Imagine you have a conlang with /T/, which you want to merge with /f/ or /s/ depending on the backness of the neighbouring vowels. Is any set of outcomes more justified than the others on phonetic grounds?
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Re: Effects of consonants on adjacent vowels (and vice-versa

Post by Travis B. »

LoneWolf wrote:Well I remember reading that alveolar or dental consonants have a tendency to front adjacent back vowels (e.g.: the word [tut] might become [tyt]) and vice-versa that velar consonants pull front vowels to the back region. All of this is pretty obvious and logical when you think about it. Alveolar and dental consonants are articulated in a region of the mouth that is close to where front vowels are made. Likewise velar consonants are articulated in the same area of the mouth as back vowels.
This happens in the English I am familiar with, where while /u/ is normally and /ʊ/ is normally [ʊ], /u/ after but nor before a coronal is [ʉ̯u] or sometimes, particularly when stressed, [i̯u], /ʊ/ after but not before a coronal is [ʉ̞̯ʊ], /u/ between coronals is [ʉ], and /ʊ/ between coronals is [ʉ̞]; while there is some idiolectal variation here, as some idiolects may have /u/ adjacent to a coronal as [ʉ], and/or /ʊ/ adjacent to a coronal as [ʉ̞], the overall principles here still hold.
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Re: Effects of consonants on adjacent vowels (and vice-versa

Post by Cedh »

Nancy Blackett wrote:Here's a pertinent question which popped into my head. Imagine you have a conlang with /T/, which you want to merge with /f/ or /s/ depending on the backness of the neighbouring vowels. Is any set of outcomes more justified than the others on phonetic grounds?
I'd say such a split of /θ/ would more likely depend on roundedness instead of backness (of course, these are often correlated with each other). That's what I've done in my conlang Doayâu anyway, where I had the following sequence of sound changes (there was neither /θ/ nor /f/ in the parent language though):
hp hm > f / V_V
ht hn > θ / V_V
ɬ > θ / _
θ > f / {u o ɔ}_, _{u o ɔ}
θ > s / otherwise

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Re: Effects of consonants on adjacent vowels (and vice-versa

Post by Basilius »

Nancy Blackett wrote:Here's a pertinent question which popped into my head. Imagine you have a conlang with /T/, which you want to merge with /f/ or /s/ depending on the backness of the neighbouring vowels. Is any set of outcomes more justified than the others on phonetic grounds?
IMO it's not 100% deterministic. On the one hand, a coronal more naturally combines with front vowels, but on the other, moving the body of tongue back naturally combines with raising its tip, which may lead to merging /T/ with /s/.

Even if you start with labializing :: palatalizing environments rather than just back :: front, it may go either way in principle, for assimilation and dissimilation are equally plausible types of processes, only with different systemic motivation.
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Re: Effects of consonants on adjacent vowels (and vice-versa

Post by TaylorS »

One sound change I have just added to Mekoshan is having stressed /a:/ becoming /ɛː/ when following /ʧ ʧʰ ʃ ʒ j/ and becoming /ɔː/ when following /p pʰ qʷ qʰʷ f v χʷ w/, the exception being if /a:/ is then followed by /tˤ tʰˤ ʦˤ ʦˤ q qʰ sˤ zˤ χ ħ ʕ/.

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Re: Effects of consonants on adjacent vowels (and vice-versa

Post by Izambri »

cedh audmanh wrote:
Nancy Blackett wrote:Here's a pertinent question which popped into my head. Imagine you have a conlang with /T/, which you want to merge with /f/ or /s/ depending on the backness of the neighbouring vowels. Is any set of outcomes more justified than the others on phonetic grounds?
I'd say such a split of /θ/ would more likely depend on roundedness instead of backness (of course, these are often correlated with each other). That's what I've done in my conlang Doayâu anyway, where I had the following sequence of sound changes (there was neither /θ/ nor /f/ in the parent language though):
hp hm > f / V_V
ht hn > θ / V_V
ɬ > θ / _
θ > f / {u o ɔ}_, _{u o ɔ}
θ > s / otherwise
The same here. Sarden had /θ/, but Peran didn't, so its descendant, Hellesan, has /ð/, /f/ or /s/ instead, more or less the way cedh sets out, since /f/ appears when there's a nearby rounded vowel.
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Re: Effects of consonants on adjacent vowels (and vice-versa

Post by Niedokonany »

Some Eastern South Slavic dialects (typically in present day Greece and Albania):

V~ > V / _[-voiced], _[-stop]

(effectively nasal vowels were preserved mostly before voiced stops, incl. affricates; inconsistencies are frequent, though)
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