Bizarre Sound Changes

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Re: Bizarre Sound Changes

Post by Bob Johnson »

Greek apparently went from [y] to [f]~[v] in certain contexts. Fortition like this and that of [j w] above weirds me.

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Re: Bizarre Sound Changes

Post by Jetboy »

Serafín wrote:
Jetboy wrote:Also, if anyone feels like cutting out steps, Latin -> colloquial Spanish has /s/ -> /e/ #_C.
The colloquial Spanish of Caribbeans and some southern Spaniards, please don't generalize this to the rest of us. :P
Huh, I thought it was more widespread than that. I knew an Argentinean who had debuccalization of coda /s/.
Soap wrote:Does anyone know if front rounded vowels have ever arisen from front unrounded vowels? e.g. i > y, rather than u > y.
Apparently Old Norse had "u-umlaut," which, near as I can tell, was basically rounding of front vowels when followed by back vowels. To quote Wikipedia:
Wikipedia wrote:Some /y/, /yː/, /ø/, /øː/, and all /ɔ/, /ɔː/ were obtained by u-umlaut from /i/, /iː/, /e/, /eː/, and /a/, /aː/ respectively. See Old Icelandic for information on /ɔː/.
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Re: Bizarre Sound Changes

Post by Ser »

Jetboy wrote:
Serafín wrote:
Jetboy wrote:Also, if anyone feels like cutting out steps, Latin -> colloquial Spanish has /s/ -> /e/ #_C.
The colloquial Spanish of Caribbeans and some southern Spaniards, please don't generalize this to the rest of us. :P
Huh, I thought it was more widespread than that. I knew an Argentinean who had debuccalization of coda /s/.
Debuccalization, s > h, isn't the same as dropping the historical /s/ altogether. Debuccalization is very widespread in both Latin America and Spain, but dropping is specific to that area I mentioned.

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Re: Bizarre Sound Changes

Post by finlay »

AnTeallach wrote:Scottish Gaelic has a habit of putting /f/ on the beginning of words which start with a vowel, because initial zero can be interpreted as grammatical lenition of /f/. You also get things like /h/ becoming /t/ for similar reasons.
you get words in english which have gained or lost initial n because, for instance, an orange and a norange sound the same. I'm sure you will have known that, though. (Incidentally, Japanese people don't tend to "get" the concept of liaison, and it can be a chore to get them to pronounce words like this as [ənɒrəndʒ] instead of [əɴʔɒrəndʒ] (that's leaving aside the fact that they usually pronounce this word [ɔɾɛndʒi]). But i've heard at least one speaker who'd internalised "hours" as "nours" because he always hears phrases like "an hour" or "half an hour" and reasoned that it must be "a nour", and later ended up pronouncing "2 hours" as "2 nours"...)

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Re: Bizarre Sound Changes

Post by sirdanilot »

Mr. Z wrote:sirdanilot: I don't think I've heard the word /ja:Tar/... Care for Hebrew transcription? I think I know the root (because your other word of the same root is familiar), but that particular form must have disappeared from the modern language...
יתר. The qal pf. form itself is not used, perhaps, though the participle is. (yother I suppose).
Does anyone know if front rounded vowels have ever arisen from front unrounded vowels?
In my very own dialect of Dutch (Zeelandic): *vi:f -> /vy:f/, *bli:f -> /bly:f/, *bəˈxriːp -> /bəˈhryːp/. This occurs only before /p/ and /f/, and the change is no longer productive, for example never in names (except if they have been living in the same village since forever, for example someone named *ˈ piːpəlɪŋk could become ˈ pyːpəlɪŋk though it would be idiolectal at best).

Interestingly, some variants of my dialect have the opposite change at the same time. *dy:r -> /di:rə/. I wouldn't say /di:rə/ myself, though.

In Standard Dutch, this foneme changed to something like /ɛɪ/ unconditionally. *vi:f -> /vɛɪf/.

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Re: Bizarre Sound Changes

Post by sirdanilot »

Skomakar'n wrote:
Whimemsz wrote:Jesus, guys, it's obvious he meant "Americanist Phonetic Notation," in which <y> is /j/, why is this such a big deal?
It wasn't entirely obvious. It's still stupid not to use IPA like everyone else in a forum like this. At least other messages in this thread related to y > u or u > y started becoming confusing after that message, because I wasn't sure whether anyone actually meant y anymore.
Please don't be ridiculous. I posted 'american IPA notation' to denote that /y/ would obviously be /j/ (everyone knows americanist IPA does that). As you may notice, I did not do so in my post above, meaning I do mean /y/ there. If I diverge from standard IPA at any time, I will note it, and so should everyone else for themselves.

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Re: Bizarre Sound Changes

Post by Drydic »

finlay wrote:
AnTeallach wrote:Scottish Gaelic has a habit of putting /f/ on the beginning of words which start with a vowel, because initial zero can be interpreted as grammatical lenition of /f/. You also get things like /h/ becoming /t/ for similar reasons.
you get words in english which have gained or lost initial n because, for instance, an orange and a norange sound the same. I'm sure you will have known that, though. (Incidentally, Japanese people don't tend to "get" the concept of liaison, and it can be a chore to get them to pronounce words like this as [ənɒrəndʒ] instead of [əɴʔɒrəndʒ] (that's leaving aside the fact that they usually pronounce this word [ɔɾɛndʒi]). But i've heard at least one speaker who'd internalised "hours" as "nours" because he always hears phrases like "an hour" or "half an hour" and reasoned that it must be "a nour", and later ended up pronouncing "2 hours" as "2 nours"...)
You fucking brits and your ɒ
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Re: Bizarre Sound Changes

Post by Miekko »

sirdanilot wrote:
Skomakar'n wrote:
Whimemsz wrote:Jesus, guys, it's obvious he meant "Americanist Phonetic Notation," in which <y> is /j/, why is this such a big deal?
It wasn't entirely obvious. It's still stupid not to use IPA like everyone else in a forum like this. At least other messages in this thread related to y > u or u > y started becoming confusing after that message, because I wasn't sure whether anyone actually meant y anymore.
Please don't be ridiculous. I posted 'american IPA notation' to denote that /y/ would obviously be /j/ (everyone knows americanist IPA does that). As you may notice, I did not do so in my post above, meaning I do mean /y/ there. If I diverge from standard IPA at any time, I will note it, and so should everyone else for themselves.
americanist PA is the preferred term.
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Re: Bizarre Sound Changes

Post by sirdanilot »

lo and behold I dropped the 'ist' off of Americanist, making my speech utterly incomprehensible

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Re: Bizarre Sound Changes

Post by Miekko »

sirdanilot wrote:lo and behold I dropped the 'ist' off of Americanist, making my speech utterly incomprehensible
lo and behold you also appended I before PA, making it confusing and wrong! (Think about it - American International ... should give you a clue there's something wrong!)
< Cev> My people we use cars. I come from a very proud car culture-- every part of the car is used, nothing goes to waste. When my people first saw the car, generations ago, we called it šuŋka wakaŋ-- meaning "automated mobile".

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Re: Bizarre Sound Changes

Post by installer_swan »

Miekko wrote:
sirdanilot wrote:lo and behold I dropped the 'ist' off of Americanist, making my speech utterly incomprehensible
lo and behold you also appended I before PA, making it confusing and wrong! (Think about it - American International ... should give you a clue there's something wrong!)
In his defence a lot of Americans probably think of international as a synonym for national (cf. "World Series" etc)
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Re: Bizarre Sound Changes

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Tropylium wrote:Moreover, the merger of lengthened *t and non-lengthened *tt was not entirely complete; a few dialects of Ume Sami have a four-way length distinction:
*tttt < *tt / _V.
*ttt < *tt / _VC.
*tt < *t / _V.
*t < *t / _VC.
What?? That's insane!
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Re: Bizarre Sound Changes

Post by Aurora Rossa »

Qwynegold wrote:What?? That's insane!
Yeah, I am almost not sure I believe it.
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Re: Bizarre Sound Changes

Post by Whimemsz »

okay time out-- what is the source and where can I learn more about this?

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Re: Bizarre Sound Changes

Post by TaylorS »

Travis B. wrote:
linguoboy wrote:Mandarin Chinese has [ai] > [iə], which is kind of wack.
Then there's English dialects which made the change of Middle English [iː] > present-day [aː] - skipping a couple steps there, of course.
NYC English bird > boid!

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Re: Bizarre Sound Changes

Post by ---- »

I'm not sure if this applies for any other words, but for my grandmother and a few other older speakers around here, the word <borrow> has a pretty drastic vowel shift at the end of the word, that is, /ou/ > /i/, so the word is pronounced approximately [bɑɹi].

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Re: Bizarre Sound Changes

Post by Tropylium »

IIRC I sighted the 4-grade claim from Pekka Sammallahti's 1998 monograph The Saami languages: An Introduction.

Phonetically it should help a little that the realizations are probably along the lines [ʰtː] : [ʰtˑ] : [ʰt] : [d̥] (the book only mentions Ume Sami in passing, but a lack of preaspiration in the length-1 series there too seems to be implied). Or perhaps not, because then we also have consider the long lenis series, [d̥ː] : [d̥ˑ] and the like (a Western Samic innovation from nasal+stop; it's possible however that Ume does not have gradation for those and thus has only five series of stops).

The fortis/lenis opposition also applies to clusters, FWIW. *pt :> [pt], but *mt :> [b̥d̥].

Also IIRC — my notes are less clear here — in Northern Sami nasals also have (phonetically) a four-way grade distinction, but it's resolved into 2×2 phonetics via preglottalization, ie. [ʔmː] : [ʔm] : [mː] : [m]

(Note to self: the Wikipedia entry for Northern Sami really needs a phonology section.)
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Re: Bizarre Sound Changes

Post by Skomakar'n »

sirdanilot wrote:
Skomakar'n wrote:
Whimemsz wrote:Jesus, guys, it's obvious he meant "Americanist Phonetic Notation," in which <y> is /j/, why is this such a big deal?
It wasn't entirely obvious. It's still stupid not to use IPA like everyone else in a forum like this. At least other messages in this thread related to y > u or u > y started becoming confusing after that message, because I wasn't sure whether anyone actually meant y anymore.
Please don't be ridiculous. I posted 'american IPA notation' to denote that /y/ would obviously be /j/ (everyone knows americanist IPA does that). As you may notice, I did not do so in my post above, meaning I do mean /y/ there. If I diverge from standard IPA at any time, I will note it, and so should everyone else for themselves.
I didn't see that, unless you mean after the message. If not, sorry.

I still don't see the point of not just using IPA, though.
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Re: Bizarre Sound Changes

Post by Nortaneous »

Theta wrote:I'm not sure if this applies for any other words, but for my grandmother and a few other older speakers around here, the word <borrow> has a pretty drastic vowel shift at the end of the word, that is, /ou/ > /i/, so the word is pronounced approximately [bɑɹi].
That's probably just loss of secondary stress; only /@ @` i/ are allowed in unstressed word-final position. (see also: 'tater', my grandfather's pronunciation of 'ohio' as ending in [@])
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Re: Bizarre Sound Changes

Post by linguoboy »

TaylorS wrote:
Travis B. wrote:
linguoboy wrote:Mandarin Chinese has [ai] > [iə], which is kind of wack.
Then there's English dialects which made the change of Middle English [iː] > present-day [aː] - skipping a couple steps there, of course.
NYC English bird > boid!
Too bad it's practically extinct these days. Also a historical feature of Yat dialect in New Orleans, where it is similarly in retreat.

There's also the reverse shift of, e.g. toilet > terlet (i.e. ['tʰɝlɨt̚]).

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Re: Bizarre Sound Changes

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Nortaneous wrote:
Theta wrote:I'm not sure if this applies for any other words, but for my grandmother and a few other older speakers around here, the word <borrow> has a pretty drastic vowel shift at the end of the word, that is, /ou/ > /i/, so the word is pronounced approximately [bɑɹi].
That's probably just loss of secondary stress; only /@ @` i/ are allowed in unstressed word-final position. (see also: 'tater', my grandfather's pronunciation of 'ohio' as ending in [@])
Not to mention the fact that "borrow" is followed by "your" most of the time. In a phrase like "Can I borrow your spade?" It would be hard to say what that vowel was, or if it had any phonemically salient quality of its own.
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Re: Bizarre Sound Changes

Post by Soap »

Do some people really have secondary stress in words like "borrow", "arrow", "window", etc? I cant help but see that as a claim people made so that they could stick to the ideal of saying that the only unstressed vowels in English are /ə ɚ ɪ i/ (or some similar system). If I heard someone saying "borrow" is if it were a compound of "bor" and "row" I'd assume they didnt know English very well.

That, or the definition of secondary stress that youre using doesnt mean the kind of secondary stress which is generally exemplified by compounds.
NYC English bird > boid!
Isnt it really just /ɜɪ/, though? Ive only heard the full-blown /ɔɪ/ in cartoons and other mock accents.
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Re: Bizarre Sound Changes

Post by AnTeallach »

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.
... and isn't/wasn't it a merger of NURSE and CHOICE as [ɜɪ] rather than the reversal it's sometimes portrayed as? I think the alleged Utah NORTH/START reversal ("barn in a born") is also actually a merger.

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Re: Bizarre Sound Changes

Post by Travis B. »

Soap wrote:Do some people really have secondary stress in words like "borrow", "arrow", "window", etc? I cant help but see that as a claim people made so that they could stick to the ideal of saying that the only unstressed vowels in English are /ə ɚ ɪ i/ (or some similar system). If I heard someone saying "borrow" is if it were a compound of "bor" and "row" I'd assume they didnt know English very well.

That, or the definition of secondary stress that youre using doesnt mean the kind of secondary stress which is generally exemplified by compounds.
By some guidelines this would be an example of tertiary stress, with it corresponding to "unstressed" "full" vowels, and contrasting with when these vowels are reduced all the way, e.g. with /oʊ̯/ being reduced to /ə/ or, before a vowel, to /əw/ (or, in some dialects, /ɵ/ instead of /ə/, from what I have read).
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Re: Bizarre Sound Changes

Post by Drydic »

AnTeallach wrote:I think the alleged Utah NORTH/START reversal ("barn in a born") is also actually a merger.
Eh? Haven't heard that one, and I'm in the next state north...
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