Re: Can relationships between languages be determined after 80,000 y

On 2008-01-30 10:27, tgpedersen wrote:

>> English /T/ is a rare enough sound --AFAIK only found
>> in Europe in English, Icelandic, Faeroese, N. Spanish,
>> Albananian and Greek; in Asia in Burmese, Classical
>> Arabic; in the Americas in Shawnee and I don't know
>> where else.
>
> AFAIK, Faeroese doesn't have it
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faroese_language
> The capital is Tórshavn, not *Þórshavn, so it seems to have þ > t like
> the Scandinavian languages.

They still have orthographic <ð>, but it's no longer pronounced as a
dental fricative; it has been lenited out of real existence and
corresponds to intervocalic hiatus filled by [w, v, j] in some classes
of environments and not filled at all in o'ers.

Piotr