----- Original Message -----
Sent: Wednesday, May 10, 2000 9:27
AM
Subject: Re: [phoNet]
(unknown)
Good! with a little bit of luck this may develop into a discussion
of how various other interestins types of speech sound (laterals, rhotics,
nasals, ejectives, implosives, doubly articulated consonants, etc.) evolve.
Let's begin with clicks. The main problem is that the languages that have
them have little or no recorded history (often in addition to having barely
been studied), so we have to rely on far-from-perfect comparative
reconstructions when trying to recover their past changes. I'll try to find
some illustrative examples of click behaviour, but please give me a
little time (one or two days) to prepare -- I've never been asked this
question before :-)
Here's some introductory information about common click types in
Khoisan languages, if you'd like to kill a little time meanwhile.
Piotr
Ok, I have a question!
I have a vague understanding of how
many sounds can change in a language
over time... a stop /t/ could become
a fricative /T/, or an unvoiced /t/
becoming a voiced /d/ for
example...
...but I don't know how this kind of change affects the
more 'exotic' sounds
such as clicks. Do clicks mutate? (I'm
sure they must). Do they mutate
into other clicks, or can they
become regular consonants? Do clicks often
mutate _from_
consonants?
That's all my question.
;p
*Muke!