Richard Wordingham wrote:
---
> >
> > As another example, 72% of languages have at least 2 liquids. 
That
> > has not stopped many Tai dialects from collapsing [l] and [r]
> > together, or losing one without replacement (via [r] > [h]). 
>
>
> Are these inferred or attested? I do not believe that most of the
data
> that passes off
> as being 'true" is really true. They are all inferred.

For the Bangkok merger of /l/ and /r/, I would say attested.  They
are distinguished in the native script, and correspond to the
Indic /l/ and /r/ in loanwords.  Thai writing (and, to a large
extent, spelling,) is 700 years old.  The merger is described as a
_Bangkok_ phenomenon, but I cannot bear witness to their being
consistently distinguished in rural dialects of Central Thailand. 
The distinction does not appear to be artificial, for cognates
across the Tai-speaking area bear out the same contrast.

Did these /l/ and /r/ come with Indic loanwords?

Did the /l/ and /r/ represent phonemes in the languages or were they (like Korean
and/or Japanese ?) merely allophones?




This contrast is also maintained at opposite ends of the Tai world -
in both Ahom (a language of Assam) and the Wu-ming dialect (a North
Tai dialect, spoken in the central part of Kwangsi).

I'm not sure whether the change /r/ > /h/ should be regarded as
inferred or attested. 

This could be a natural process e.g. rolled r slowly becoming uvular etc, like french r
and then going to something like h. But these are the general kinds of rules
I am interested in. It still fits into the "nearest-neighbor" shift pattern.

For attestation, I quote Li on the subect -
'Among the SW dialects, it is preseerved as r- in Ahom and siamese,
but Lü [= Tai Lue, Ethnologue code KHB] has a literary pronunciation
hr-, a voiceless r-, for the common h- in ordinary sppech; other SW
dialects show simply h-.'
If it was /hr/ this means only one of them got assimilated.

In the new Tai Lue script (
http://www.omniglot.com/writing/tailue.htm ) the 'low' "h" looks
suspiciously like the Thai "r".  'Low' in this context means for the
series of tones for words with formerly voiced initial consonants. 
Words evidencing this change belong to this group.  Similar spelling
evidence can be seen in Lao, where the low "h" descends from "r". 
One can look this up in the orthography section for Siamese (code
THJ) at Ethnologue.  Do you count all this as inference or
attestation?

There is also a change /hr/ > /h/ in Central Tai and most of SW Tai,
but I think this has to be inferred.  Ahom is the only dialect
reported by Li to have escaped the change - it has /r/.  Wu-ming
also has /r/.  This change seems to have preceded Siamese writing.

Richard.



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-- 
Mark Hubey
hubeyh@...
http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey