There are 9 messages in this issue.
Topics in this digest:
1a. Re: THEORY: Sound change of vowel-like sound into rhotic
From: Dirk Elzinga
1b. Re: THEORY: Sound change of vowel-like sound into rhotic
From: Matthew Boutilier
1c. Re: THEORY: Sound change of vowel-like sound into rhotic
From: Eric Christopherson
2a. Re: Construct state markers without overt possessor marking
From: Alex Fink
2b. Re: Construct state markers without overt possessor marking
From: Robert Marshall Murphy
3a. Re: THEORY: Likelihood of special interaction of VC[+glottal]V
From: Galen Buttitta
4a. Re: software vocal tract models?
From: Alex Fink
5a. Re: the symmetry of sound change
From: Alex Fink
6. the origin of /N/ (was: the symmetry of sound change)
From: Matthew Boutilier
Messages
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1a. Re: THEORY: Sound change of vowel-like sound into rhotic
Posted by: "Dirk Elzinga" [email protected]
Date: Sat Jun 22, 2013 3:42 pm ((PDT))
Some speakers of Ute (Uto-Aztecan) have a heavily rhotacized realization of
[ø]. Pronunciations range from [ø] to [ø˞] to [ɹ̩]. For example, the word
pö'öi 'write' can be pronounced [pøˈʔøi] / [pø˞ˈʔø˞i] / [pɹ̩ˈʔɹ̩i]. I have
examples of all of these pronunciations in my field recordings.
I believe Serrano has a whole set of rhotacized vowels, but I'm not sure
where they came from. Serrano is a Uto-Aztecan language of the Takic
branch; Takic historical phonology is very complicated, and it's outside my
immediate area of expertise.
Dirk
On Sat, Jun 22, 2013 at 12:19 PM, Eric Christopherson <[email protected]>wrote:
> There are several languages where syllable-final rhotics have developed
> into vowel-like sounds and sometimes dropped out, e.g. English and German.
> Does it ever happen that vowels develop into rhotics?
>
> I am thinking of "rhotic" as a really broad group, including things that
> actually are vowels/approximant like the *pre*vocalic resonant in English;
> but I'm especially interested in development of vowels > vowel-like rhotics
> > rhotic taps, flaps, trills, etc.
Messages in this topic (5)
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1b. Re: THEORY: Sound change of vowel-like sound into rhotic
Posted by: "Matthew Boutilier" [email protected]
Date: Sat Jun 22, 2013 3:54 pm ((PDT))
i also thought of the 'idear' phenomenon in many varieties of English,
though that's not a regular sound change, obviously. and i'm not sure
whether its origin is a lexical extension of the R-liaison they do in the
UK ("Anna-r-and I") or somebody doing some sort of cross-dialectical
analogy of "[fi@] : 'fear' :: [aI'di@] : 'idear'," or something else. but
there's that.
also, to fix something (lest i look like a fool) which i'm sure no one
cares about,
On Sat, Jun 22, 2013 at 1:45 PM, Matthew Boutilier
<[email protected]>wrote:
>
> i have a sound change where uvulars become velars, and leave a residual
> offglide before (long) non-back vowels, which eventually develops into a
> uvular R, basically.
>
> *qiʔkɑn > *qīkan > *qʁīkan > kʁīkan 'i drank'
> *χāθæn > *χʁāθə > *hʁāθə > ʁāθə 'bottle'
>
>
uvulars do indeed become velars in this process, and /X/ likewise goes to
/x/, but not after simplifying to /h/ word-initially, which is a totally
different thing.
matt
Messages in this topic (5)
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1c. Re: THEORY: Sound change of vowel-like sound into rhotic
Posted by: "Eric Christopherson" [email protected]
Date: Sat Jun 22, 2013 9:14 pm ((PDT))
On Jun 22, 2013, at 5:54 PM, Matthew Boutilier <[email protected]> wrote:
> i also thought of the 'idear' phenomenon in many varieties of English,
> though that's not a regular sound change, obviously. and i'm not sure
> whether its origin is a lexical extension of the R-liaison they do in the
> UK ("Anna-r-and I") or somebody doing some sort of cross-dialectical
> analogy of "[fi@] : 'fear' :: [aI'di@] : 'idear'," or something else. but
> there's that.
True; good point.
I also remember hearing someone on a UK show with a sort of stereotyped accent
(chav?) saying something like (final) /ja.r\`=/ for "yeah"; I'm not sure if
this form actually occurs, or where its rhotic came from. I also think I've
heard various UK and maybe Australian actors with a similar rhotic in "no", but
in a more neutral register; I wonder if what I'm hearing there is the offglide
in /o:/; I can only think of it happening in 'lects where the nucleus of that
diphthong is more front than [o].
(And then there's Madea; again, I'm not sure if this stereotyped speech comes
from reality.)
>
> also, to fix something (lest i look like a fool) which i'm sure no one
> cares about,
Don't you hate it when that happens?
>
> On Sat, Jun 22, 2013 at 1:45 PM, Matthew Boutilier
> <[email protected]>wrote:
>
>>
>> i have a sound change where uvulars become velars, and leave a residual
>> offglide before (long) non-back vowels, which eventually develops into a
>> uvular R, basically.
>>
>> *qiʔkɑn > *qīkan > *qʁīkan > kʁīkan 'i drank'
>> *χāθæn > *χʁāθə > *hʁāθə > ʁāθə 'bottle'
>>
>>
> uvulars do indeed become velars in this process, and /X/ likewise goes to
> /x/, but not after simplifying to /h/ word-initially, which is a totally
> different thing.
>
> matt
Alex wrote:
> I recently implicitly confessed to not knowing of one, in the last paragraph
> here:
> http://listserv.brown.edu/archives/cgi-bin/wa?A2=conlang;b85a381a.1304C
> Needless to say I'm interested if anyone can come up with one too.
Wow, what a coincidence. And here I was, ignoring that thread! The point about
sound changes being stopped and reversed before completion is well taken.
Also, it occurs to me that I wonder about the same question, involving
laterals. I believe I have trouble narrowing down just what sound is in use
when certain people (most of them on TV) pronounce a noticeably "dark" /l/; in
some cases I'm tempted to think it isn't even lateral -- more like a velar or
postvelar approximant.
Anyway, I remember when I was around grade-school age hearing other kids
(possibly mostly girls) uttering something like [I:M:] to express disgust, like
"ew" but drawn out and unrounded. But I always thought it sounded like
something close to, but not quite identical to, <ill>.
Messages in this topic (5)
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2a. Re: Construct state markers without overt possessor marking
Posted by: "Alex Fink" [email protected]
Date: Sat Jun 22, 2013 4:41 pm ((PDT))
On Sat, 22 Jun 2013 12:28:42 -0500, Eric Christopherson <[email protected]>
wrote:
>Hello, all. I'm wondering:
>1. If it's attested for languages with construct state (e.g. Semitic
>languages) to allow a noun phrase to appear *in* the construct state but
>*without* an overt possessor (either an NP or possessive affix); and
I was all about to say that I've never heard the application of the name
"construct state" outside of Afro-Asiatic. But then I went to look up the
language which I was remembering regarding an answer to (2), and whaddya know,
the grammar uses "construct state".
>2. What the semantics of that sort of construction might be.
>
>For #2, I would hypothesize the existence of 3rd-person interpretations, as in
>Ainu, but I have wondered too if a noun in construct state without overt
>possessor marking might be construed in some languages some other way, e.g. as
>being simply definite, or possessed by the 1st or 2nd person. In one of my
>conlangs in progress, it's occurred to me to have the usual
>non-overtly-possessed construct NP be interpreted as 3rd-person-possessed,
>e.g. father-CONS "his/her/their father", but in the vocative have it be
>1st-person, e.g. father-CONS-VOC "O my father".
The Ulwa language of Nicaragua and Honduras has a "construct state", to wit, a
paradigm of head-marked possessed forms, in which the 3sg is not clearly
formally simpler than all the others. Third-person construct state nouns,
however, can appear without overt possessors, giving most transparently the
sense 'his/her N, their N' (5.4 of the grammar below), but it can also be used
as a marker of definiteness (6.1.3.4), and cause hypernymic broadening of the
sense of its base (6.2): e.g. the bare noun _was_ is specifically 'water' while
the 3sg construct _was-ka_ can refer to any liquid; 'liquid' per se is
expressed _dî waska_ 'something's water'.
http://www.slaxicon.org/files/papers/thesis.pdf
Alex
Messages in this topic (3)
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2b. Re: Construct state markers without overt possessor marking
Posted by: "Robert Marshall Murphy" [email protected]
Date: Sat Jun 22, 2013 4:52 pm ((PDT))
I just wrote a paper for class about how much more I saw the construct state in
Aramaic compared to my previous studies of Hebrew. I compared Aramaic's
prolific use of the construct state for things high on the animacy scale to
Austronesian "inalienable possession". All that to say, the entire point of
the construct state is to *REQUIRE* the possessor! I've only studied Hebrew,
Ugaritic, Aramaic, Akkadian and Syriac, but I've never heard of construct state
without an absolute noun (nomen rectum).
-Robert Marshall Murphy-
On Jun 22, 2013, at 6:41 PM, Alex Fink <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Sat, 22 Jun 2013 12:28:42 -0500, Eric Christopherson <[email protected]>
> wrote:
>
>> Hello, all. I'm wondering:
>> 1. If it's attested for languages with construct state (e.g. Semitic
>> languages) to allow a noun phrase to appear *in* the construct state but
>> *without* an overt possessor (either an NP or possessive affix); and
>
> I was all about to say that I've never heard the application of the name
> "construct state" outside of Afro-Asiatic. But then I went to look up the
> language which I was remembering regarding an answer to (2), and whaddya
> know, the grammar uses "construct state".
>
>> 2. What the semantics of that sort of construction might be.
>>
>> For #2, I would hypothesize the existence of 3rd-person interpretations, as
>> in Ainu, but I have wondered too if a noun in construct state without overt
>> possessor marking might be construed in some languages some other way, e.g.
>> as being simply definite, or possessed by the 1st or 2nd person. In one of
>> my conlangs in progress, it's occurred to me to have the usual
>> non-overtly-possessed construct NP be interpreted as 3rd-person-possessed,
>> e.g. father-CONS "his/her/their father", but in the vocative have it be
>> 1st-person, e.g. father-CONS-VOC "O my father".
>
> The Ulwa language of Nicaragua and Honduras has a "construct state", to wit,
> a paradigm of head-marked possessed forms, in which the 3sg is not clearly
> formally simpler than all the others. Third-person construct state nouns,
> however, can appear without overt possessors, giving most transparently the
> sense 'his/her N, their N' (5.4 of the grammar below), but it can also be
> used as a marker of definiteness (6.1.3.4), and cause hypernymic broadening
> of the sense of its base (6.2): e.g. the bare noun _was_ is specifically
> 'water' while the 3sg construct _was-ka_ can refer to any liquid; 'liquid'
> per se is expressed _dî waska_ 'something's water'.
> http://www.slaxicon.org/files/papers/thesis.pdf
>
> Alex
Messages in this topic (3)
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3a. Re: THEORY: Likelihood of special interaction of VC[+glottal]V
Posted by: "Galen Buttitta" [email protected]
Date: Sat Jun 22, 2013 4:59 pm ((PDT))
With regards to 1), while I cannot say for sure if it's common
cross-linguistically, but the grammar of Nuichahnulth that was linked in an
episode of "Conlangery" tells of how apparently in this language, at least,
there is a partial assimilation where /a/ > [e] / _?i.
SATOR
AREPO
TENET
OPERA
ROTAS
On Jun 22, 2013, at 13:16, Eric Christopherson <[email protected]> wrote:
> I remember reading in descriptions of at least two languages that, in those
> particular languages, vowels separated by glottal sounds (i.e. [?] or [h])
> often undergo total assimilation or, in at least one of those languages,
> metathesis.
>
> 1. Is this fairly common cross-linguistically?
> 2. Is there any reason to suppose transglottal interactions of these sorts
> would be more likely (either in specific languages or crosslinguistically)
> than in pure sequences of two vowels?
> 2a. Or two vowels separated by some other kind of consonant?
>
> I know that the "consonants" [?] and [h] are actually not quite consonantal
> according to some analyses (and I think depending on the specific language);
> and they actually affect surrounding vowels where e.g. [t] would not; so
> perhaps this makes a difference.
Messages in this topic (2)
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4a. Re: software vocal tract models?
Posted by: "Alex Fink" [email protected]
Date: Sat Jun 22, 2013 5:17 pm ((PDT))
On Sat, 22 Jun 2013 12:02:57 -0500, Eric Christopherson <[email protected]>
wrote:
>On Jun 17, 2013, at 11:59 PM, Alex Fink <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> I have some ideas for a random phonology generator which would
>> overcome certain features I came to find limiting about the model I
>> used in Gleb.
>>
>> I understand that software models of the vocal tract exist, that allow
>> you to specify the positions over time of the various articulators and
>> then compute what the resulting frequencies / airflows / whatever are.
>[...]
>> Does anyone happen to know of one like this? Or indeed anything about
>> what the modern state of affairs in the field is?
>
>I don't, unfortunately, although I'm very interested. I'd particularly like
>some code that can model likely vs. unlikely sound changes. (Perhaps I could
>go through _Evolutionary phonology_ and build one myself without recourse to a
>vocal tract model.)
Thinking I might get by without such a model is how I started out, too. But
eventually that got hairy -- witness the overgrown state of
<https://github.com/alexfink/random_language/blob/master/phonology/features.yml>
-- and I felt I might be able to get away with specifying fewer individual
"feature A influences feature B" rules and trying to derive them from firster
principles, and eventually I realised thàt was solving a problem others had
already solved. (I saw my first one in Westbury and Keating, _On the
naturalness of stop consonant voicing_, 1986.
Of course, on the one hand, this might be making the problem harder 'cause if I
have a vocal tract model and it disagrees with observed sound changes I now
have to try to tweak the model to produce it, not just fiat in another
interaction. And on the other hand, it might be that a certain amount of
Gleb's problems would be solved by being able to abandon some of the poor
assumptions it's unfixably built around, like binarity of all features and
nonexistence of anything like duration, without going whole hog.
If you do build something yourself, I'd of course be very excited -- I'd hope
it's coded in a language I can use and you wouldn't mind my building on it, or
perhaps even collaborating.
Alex
Messages in this topic (3)
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5a. Re: the symmetry of sound change
Posted by: "Alex Fink" [email protected]
Date: Sat Jun 22, 2013 5:37 pm ((PDT))
On Sat, 22 Jun 2013 14:03:01 -0500, Matthew Boutilier <[email protected]>
wrote:
>this is certainly not strange at all. in fact from a typological standpoint
>it's a lot weirder to *have* /N/, for whatever reason.
No! Certainly not a *lot* weirder. The odds are slightly pretty much exactly
fifty-fifty that a random language will have it, in WALS. However, in three
out of eight languages that have it, it can't appear in absolute initial
position (and perhaps other initial positions).
http://wals.info/feature/9A
>all the languages that *do* have /N/ seem to either develop it from /ng/ >
>[Ng] > /N/ (thus generally restricted to syllable codas) or inherit it from
>Proto-Austronesian or something.
That's the prevailing one, yeah, but there are other sources of [N] (and thus
of /N/). At times it seems to be the mòst preferred nasal in coda: witness
e.g. Caribbean dialects of Spanish, and many Chinese varieties, shifting all
coda nasals to [N] -- in some Spanishes even internally before heterorganic
stops! In Nyole, a Bantu language, /N/ comes from *p, seemingly by
rhinoglottophilia from an intermediate [h]. In Samoyedic, [N] was epenthesised
before initial vowels. And of course even if there is [Ng] it doesn't have to
come from /ng/; prenasal series can come from elsewhere (I seem to remember SE
Asian examples of spontaneous prenasalisation of voiced stops).
Alex
Messages in this topic (10)
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6. the origin of /N/ (was: the symmetry of sound change)
Posted by: "Matthew Boutilier" [email protected]
Date: Sat Jun 22, 2013 10:28 pm ((PDT))
On Sat, Jun 22, 2013 at 7:37 PM, Alex Fink <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> No! Certainly not a *lot* weirder. The odds are slightly pretty much
> exactly fifty-fifty that a random language will have it, in WALS. However,
> in three out of eight languages that have it, it can't appear in absolute
> initial position (and perhaps other initial positions).
> http://wals.info/feature/9A
>
fair enough. my apologies for not gathering the relevant statistics before
throwing out my usual blanket statements. nevertheless my main point was
that phonologies with /m/ and /n/ and no /N/ (with or without [N]) are all
over the place.
> That's the prevailing one, yeah, but there are other sources of [N] (and
> thus of /N/). At times it seems to be the mòst preferred nasal in coda:
> witness e.g. Caribbean dialects of Spanish, and many Chinese varieties,
> shifting all coda nasals to [N] -- in some Spanishes even internally before
> heterorganic stops! In Nyole, a Bantu language, /N/ comes from *p,
> seemingly by rhinoglottophilia from an intermediate [h]. In Samoyedic, [N]
> was epenthesised before initial vowels. And of course even if there is
> [Ng] it doesn't have to come from /ng/; prenasal series can come from
> elsewhere (I seem to remember SE Asian examples of spontaneous
> prenasalisation of voiced stops).
>
another one i thought of is the Hindi word for 'lion' which (i don't know
Hindi) sounds to me like [sIN] but the wikipedia-supplied phonology
suggests it could also be [sINg] = /sIng/, since /N/ is not listed among
the Hindi consonant phonemes. either way, Sanskrit *siṃha* with the usual
place-assimilation of the anusvara 'm' thing, since Sanskrit /h/ somehow
counts as a velar according to the traditional grammarian(s). if anyone can
explain that to me, that'd be great.
matt
Messages in this topic (1)
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