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From: deb5@midway.uchicago.edu (Daniel von Brighoff)
Subject: Re: Unlikely sound changes
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Date: Tue, 18 Mar 1997 17:13:52 GMT
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Nobody seems to be answering the original question, so I'll give it a
shot.

In article <adinkin-ya023180001703971944030001@news.usa1.com>,
Aaron J. Dinkin <adinkin@commschool.org> wrote:
>It doesn't seem likely in any language that a phoneme such as /k/ - a velar
>stop - would eventually turn into /tS/ - a postalveolar affricate - in any
>environment. The phones have next to nothing in common, and it would be
>hard to imagine what could cause one to gradually evolve into the other.
>Similarly, /g/ becoming /dZ/ - the voiced equivalent - seems equally
>unlikely.

In one step, yes.  But I don't find anything about the usual progression
(palatalisation, fronting, affrication) odd at all.  It happens often
enough with [t]/[d] as well (e.g. Quebecois [p@tsI] vs. Parisian French
[pti]; Catalan [n@'sjo] (Old Catalan [na'tsjo]) vs. Latin [natjo];
American English [m@'tS@r] vs. British English [m@'tjur], French [matyR]).

Well, actually I do find the relative rarity of the palatal stops unusual.
For some reason, speakers seem to overwhelmingly prefer affricates, either
post-aveolar or palatal (e.g. Chinese).  Given this odd bit of distribu-
tion, the results of palatalisation of the velars are quite  straight-
forward.  But maybe it's just because it's so common that it only *seems*
straightforward.

>Yet those very sound changes have occurred with surprising frequency. In
>French, Latin, and English, what once was /k/ has become /tS/ in some
>environments, and in English, Latin, and Arabic /g/ has become /dZ/. Does
>anyone see any reason these fairly outlandish sound changes should occur so
>similarly in such disparate languages?

Actually, in Classical Arabic (and still today in some dialects, notably
some Bedouin ones and Sudanese), [g] became, er, a voiced palatal stop.
(I use it so rarely here I've forgotten the transcription; it's the
undotted barred <j> in IPA).  The shift to [dZ] is later and has something
to do with that odd preference for affricates I mentioned above.  The
especially odd aspects of the Arabic change are 1) it's universal (not due
to the effect of a following high vowel/glide, as in the other examoples)
and 2) it destroys the symmetry of the system (leaving /k/ without a
voiced counterpart).

>How about /w/ -> /v/, which occurred in Latin, various Germanic languages,
>and Hebrew (et al.?)? Its easy to understand how this one may have
>happened, as the phones are quite similar, but not why it happens so often.

Does it really happen that often?  The examples you give are practically
all limited to Europe (do Oriental Jews also have the shift of [w] ->
[v]?); the only outside examples I can think of are Wu/Shanghainese
(although there are apparently sporadic changes of [w] -> [v] in
Beijinghua as well), possibly Vietnamese (cf. Viet. [vu-o-N], Cantonese
[wON] "king").  I'm not sure what the relationship is between [v] and [w]
in Hindi and other Indic languages; <v> is preferred in scholarly
transcription, but [w]/<w> dominates in speech and informal transcription
(e.g. borrowed words like "swami" and "wallah").  Does this point to a
real historical changes or just a quirk of Sanskritists?  (Lord knows
their transcription has enough other odd conventions.)

-- 
	 Daniel "Da" von Brighoff    /\          Dilettanten
	(deb5@midway.uchicago.edu)  /__\         erhebt Euch
				   /____\      gegen die Kunst!
