(L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here [2010-2019]

[zyma]

Because the derivation isn't sure. There are more than one (two or three) theories how the current form was derived. (At least how I understand it, I'm only proofreading the text.)

Attestation means that you actually have evidence of the word, either in writing or speech. (In the case of a proto-form, it would likely be in writing.) If something is attested, no asterisk is needed; if it's reconstructed, then you do write an asterisk before the reconstructed word. So, for example, Vulgar Latin JUNIPERU 'juniper' is attested (we have some letter or inscription or something showing an actual Latin speaker writing this word), but Vulgar Latin *JENIPRU is unattested and instead reconstructed from Spanish enebro.

So, if I understand you correctly, some modern word may have come from two or three older, attested words? You wouldn't use asterisks. Just to give a quick real-life example: Italian capre (plural of capra) may come from either Latin CAPRAE (nom.pl) or CAPRAS (acc.pl). (All of which are attested, so no asterisks.)

The second paragraph is pretty much what I was going to say. As far as I know, there's no simple way (like adding an asterisk) to indicate that a stated connection between two words, such as Clio's examples of caprae > capre or capras > capre, is uncertain. I'd just add a quick note addressing this near wherever the uncertain connection/derivation is stated.

[Tanni]

Thanks, Clio and shimobaatar!

[HoskhMatriarch]

Does anyone know how contrastive aspiration develops in natlangs, especially in ones that have aspirated, voiced, and voiceless but not breathy voiced sounds?

Edit: I should probably just go to the Index Diachronica and look for that and the other sound changes I want there...

[zyma]

Does anyone know how contrastive aspiration develops in natlangs, especially in ones that have aspirated, voiced, and voiceless but not breathy voiced sounds?

Edit: I should probably just go to the Index Diachronica and look for that and the other sound changes I want there...

I'm probably misunderstanding something, but if a language has aspirated, voiced, and voiceless sounds, doesn't it already have contrastive aspiration?

And yes, I'd recommend looking into existing databases of sound changes and other such resources. For any given phonetic feature, there are almost certainly many attested ways for it to develop in natural languages, and countless other ways that are naturalistic, yet unattested.

[HoskhMatriarch]

Does anyone know how contrastive aspiration develops in natlangs, especially in ones that have aspirated, voiced, and voiceless but not breathy voiced sounds?

Edit: I should probably just go to the Index Diachronica and look for that and the other sound changes I want there...

I'm probably misunderstanding something, but if a language has aspirated, voiced, and voiceless sounds, doesn't it already have contrastive aspiration?

And yes, I'd recommend looking into existing databases of sound changes and other such resources. For any given phonetic feature, there are almost certainly many attested ways for it to develop in natural languages, and countless other ways that are naturalistic, yet unattested.

I mean how a language can develop contrastive aspiration and end up with aspirated, tenuis, and voiced stops and affricates and not have breathy voiced sounds too. It doesn't seem super common to have breathy voiced sounds if you have the other three, but I'm not sure how to not develop them after there's already voicing and aspiration is being developed (although I'll probably read it somewhere and see that it's super obvious). I'm also not sure why I don't see, say, aspirated epiglottal stops in languages that have both contrastive aspiration and epiglottal stops, even if there's weird stuff like aspirated uvular affricates. In other words, I probably just don't understand how a lot of sound changes work.

[Sumelic]

Does anyone know how contrastive aspiration develops in natlangs, especially in ones that have aspirated, voiced, and voiceless but not breathy voiced sounds?

Fairly recently there was a pretty extensive discussion on the ZBB about the origins of phonemic aspiration. It's mixed with stuff about nasal vowels, hopefully that's not too much of an inconvenience. I think the thread focuses mostly on true voiceless aspirates rather than "voiced aspirated" or breathy-voiced consonants.

[HoskhMatriarch]

Does anyone know how contrastive aspiration develops in natlangs, especially in ones that have aspirated, voiced, and voiceless but not breathy voiced sounds?

Fairly recently there was a pretty extensive discussion on the ZBB about the origins of phonemic aspiration. It's mixed with stuff about nasal vowels, hopefully that's not too much of an inconvenience. I think the thread focuses mostly on true voiceless aspirates rather than "voiced aspirated" or breathy-voiced consonants.

Thanks!

So geminate consonants is one? I've heard also that geminate [l] can change into [t͡ɬ] and [ɬ]. Now I just need to figure out where the aspirated [t͡ɬ]s I've seen before come from... *will be researching a lot on geminate consonants*

I haven't found anything on the origins of /t͡ɬ/ and /ɬ/ yet to know if I need an aspirated one...

[HoskhMatriarch]

I hope posting twice in a row isn't a problem (although I kind of suspect it is), but how often do each of the various uvular sounds show retracted tongue root/cause retraction of neighboring vowels? I know the /ʀ/ and its allophones in languages with a uvular rhotic essentially never do, and I've heard that /q/ almost always causes it, but I'm still not even sure what "almost always" is, nor do I know how often, say, a non-rhotic voiceless uvular fricative or affricate causes it.

[qwed117]

How do /o.'wa/ and /o.'u.a/ differ in a non-moraic language?

[Xing]

How do /o.'wa/ and /o.'u.a/ differ in a non-moraic language?

Depends on the language, but I'd presume that /w/ is shorter and/or higher than /u/.

[gach]

How do /o.'wa/ and /o.'u.a/ differ in a non-moraic language?

For this question to make full sense you have to first define what you mean by syllable breaks. In other words, how would /o.'u.a/ and /o.'ua/ be different from each other? If syllable counting isn't relevant for the prosody of the language, the difference will probably be subtle or non-existent. However, irrespective of any mora or syllable counting there is one clear difference between /o.'wa/ and /o.'u.a/. In /o.'wa/ the stress is on /a/, which will then be more audible than the /w/ (or the non-syllabic /u̯/, if you will). On /o.'u.a/ the stress is unambiguously on /u/, making it the most audible vowel over /a/ and causing the full sequence to sound a lot more like [o'ua̯].

[Omzinesý]

QUESTION

Some conlangs here have contrasted plain stop, aspirated stop, and palatalized stop. Do palatalization and aspiration really appear in the same 'paradigm' in a natlang?

[HoskhMatriarch]

QUESTION

Some conlangs here have contrasted plain stop, aspirated stop, and palatalized stop. Do palatalization and aspiration really appear in the same 'paradigm' in a natlang?

I haven't seen it, but I don't see why they couldn't, since there are things like labialized and ejective consonants in the same natlang all the time. I'm actively looking for it now because surely it must exist...

[Ahzoh]

Can someone explain Spanish allophony to me? Or like list it in change/target/environment form?

I am already aware that voice stops are lenited intervocalically, though sometimes I hear from the tutor/teacher person the lenition in other places, and sometime I hear <r> as /r/ rather than a flap...

But anything else?

[sangi39]

QUESTION

Some conlangs here have contrasted plain stop, aspirated stop, and palatalized stop. Do palatalization and aspiration really appear in the same 'paradigm' in a natlang?

I wrote a reply to this yesterday which appears didn't get posted (I was having connection issues at around about that time, so it's not too surprising).

Anyway, are we talking about, for example, /t tʰ tʲ/ without /tʰʲ/. I can't remember coming across a natlang with such an inventory, but gaps in palatalisation do occur. For example, gaps can occur in relation to POA, e.g. lack of palatalised labials (Scottish Gaelic), lack of palatalised velars (these are allophonic according to some analyses of Russian). Gaps can also occur due to sound change, e.g. /ɾ ɾʲ/ > /ɾ ð/ in some Hebridean dialects of Scottish Gaelic. IIRC, gaps can also occur in relation to MOA, with phonemic palatalisation being a feature of plosives and nasal stops, but not of approximants and fricatives in one natlang (possibly due to sound change), but I might be remembering that wrong.

If we're talking about a language having all of /t tʰ tʲ tʰʲ/, then Khalkha Mongolian has exactly that according to Wikipedia, as does and language called Hmu.

[gach]

In all the cases I know of, where palatalisation is applicable to more than one or two POA, it's a pretty universal feature. There might be a POA where it doesn't apply or it might be blocked on a set of individual phonemes. In Khalkha, for example, the only non-trivial lack of a palatal contrast of any sort on the native inherited phonemes is on /ŋ/. It sounds unlikely to me that a whole mode of articulation, like aspirated stops, would be able to block palatalisation. Certainly, if the palatalisation contrast originates from adjacent front vowels, it shouldn't care if the stop subject to the conditions is aspirated or not. Neither should developing palatalisation on a stop be able to get rid of its aspiration.

My view is that treating palatalisation and aspiration as comparable types of articulation comes from seeing their diacritics grouped into the same IPA table and noticing their graphical similarities. It can be easy to imagine these as functionally similar features if you aren't familiar with very many languages having them.

[HoskhMatriarch]

In all the cases I know of, where palatalisation is applicable to more than one or two POA, it's a pretty universal feature. There might be a POA where it doesn't apply or it might be blocked on a set of individual phonemes. In Khalkha, for example, the only non-trivial lack of a palatal contrast of any sort on the native inherited phonemes is on /ŋ/. It sounds unlikely to me that a whole mode of articulation, like aspirated stops, would be able to block palatalisation. Certainly, if the palatalisation contrast originates from adjacent front vowels, it shouldn't care if the stop subject to the conditions is aspirated or not. Neither should developing palatalisation on a stop be able to get rid of its aspiration.

My view is that treating palatalisation and aspiration as comparable types of articulation comes from seeing their diacritics grouped into the same IPA table and noticing their graphical similarities. It can be easy to imagine these as functionally similar features if you aren't familiar with very many languages having them.

I made a phonology that has plain, aspirated, palatalized, and palatalized-aspirated stops once, and people were just like "why do you have aspiration and palatalization, that's too much..." (although my palalization was only applicable to coronal consonants, aspiration was everywhere... edit: ah, what was I saying even). It's nice to know that natlangs occasionally do that, because I'm going to be using a phonology like that for one of the more widely spoken languages in my conworld called Lokar that doesn't have voicing contrasts (it at least won't for stops) and is somewhat (but probably not that much) inspired phonologically by English and Lithuanian but also with a kind of interdependent consonant-vowel length thing like Icelandic, Swedish, or Italian.

[Omzinesý]

Thank you.

I meant something like:
pʰ tʰ kʰ 
pʲ tʲ kʲ
p t k

[Salmoneus]

Thank you.

I meant something like:
pʰ tʰ kʰ 
pʲ tʲ kʲ
p t k

I would think this would be extremely unlikely, and unstable.

However, it should be possible. I could see two possible routes:

a) you start off with, say, [p p_h, p'] (that was an ejective, that last one). Over time, the ejective becomes a pharyngealised stop or the like. Then the pharyngealisation becomes, say, velarisation. Then the velarisation drifts forward to become palatalisation.

b) you start off with just [p]. But there are a range of clusters, including clusters like [pl pj pr] and clusters like [px ph]. The former all merge into [pj] clusters, which then becomes [p_j]. The latter merge into [ph], which then becomes [p_h].

Both of these routes would believably, I think, give you [p p_h p_j] as a set.

But neither of them is exactly going to be a commonplace route, and they'd need things set up just right. And I think the result would be unstable: allophonic palatalisation of [p_h] plus allophonic aspiration of [p_j] would probably soon create [p_h_j].

[Ephraim]

QUESTION

Some conlangs here have contrasted plain stop, aspirated stop, and palatalized stop. Do palatalization and aspiration really appear in the same 'paradigm' in a natlang?

I don't know of any language where palatalization seems to pattern with VOT, phonation or airstream mechanism in that way. If a language contrasts tenuis stops with voiced, aspirated, ejectives etc., the common pattern seem to be to have palatalization for all series (although not necessarily for all places of articulation).

That isn't to say that there couldn't be exceptions to this, I just don't know of any such language. It's not the easiest thing to search for but there are databases of phonologies such as PHOIBLE where you can search for individual segments and see in which languages they occur. However, I haven't been able to figure out how to combine two searches to see for example which languages has both /kʲ/ and /kʰ/.
http://phoible.org

I seem to recall seeing another searchable database of phonologies but I can't remember where I found it.

I did do a quick search for palatalized stops in this PDF and no language seemed to treat palatalization the way you describe:
https://www.sciencemag.org/content/supp ... ng.SOM.pdf

It may be that the three-way tenuis—aspirated—palatalized contrast in some conlangs is inspired by the way some Semitic languages treat pharyngealized stops (probably from original ejectives). So it is at least possible to have a secondary articulation pattern with VOT. Although this may be a bit unstable, seeing as Arabic for example has developed voiced pharyngealized stops to fill the gap.

Also, interestingly, a Sami and Chadic languages seem to treat palatalization as a suprasegmental feature affecting the whole syllable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skolt_Sam ... segmentals

I made a phonology that has plain, aspirated, palatalized, and palatalized-aspirated stops once, and people were just like "why do you have aspiration and palatalization, that's too much..." (although my palalization was only applicable to coronal consonants, aspiration was too).

That's definetely not too much, palatalization and aspiration coöccur all the time. It's probably more odd to have an aspiration contrast only on non-palatalized stops than to have it on both.