Re: alveolar stop - alveolar lateral alterations

From: nathrao
Message: 36906
Date: 2005-04-03

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Petusek" <petusek@...> wrote:
> Hello everybody,
>
> does anyone know of any language which changes voiced alveolar
stops (or a cluster of alveolars) to alveolar liquids REGULARLY,
especially word-initially?

This is not word-initial, but may be of interest: Proto-Dravidian (and
even Old Tamil) antecedent of the Tamil phoneme usually transcribed as
R (or r-underscore or t-underscore in print) is accepted to have been
alveolar (and voiced intervocalically). Modern colloquial
pronunciation is as /r/. Same is true of Kannada, I believe. [In
Modern Tamil, orthographic doubled RR (doubling indictes both length
and voicelessness) is /tt/.]

Nath Rao