sound replacement in loans

[Marie-Lucie Tarpent]

I don't know anything about the languages in question, but how recent are the loans?  If they are fairly old, could "sh" and "%" both have arisen from a common source which was neither?

Also, the Spanish change "sh"> [x] is documented also in a French dialect (Poitou/Vendée) and also in some Canadian French (e.g. Manitoba).  My guess is that it arises from a retracted, even retroflexed pronunciation of the "sh" which produces an auditory effect similar to that of [x].  In these dialects both "sh" and "zh" have become velar fricatives, voiceless and voiced respectively.  

Getting back to the 2 languages considered, if "sh" is indeed the original in the donor language , it might have undergone extreme retroflexion in the borrowing language, and then be interpreted as a consonant involving the extreme back of the mouth, all the way to the pharynx.  The development of the manner of articulation and the glottal state of this new consonant could be secondary to that of the new place of articulation.           

Marie-Lucie Tarpent
Mount Saint Vincent University
Halifax, Canada

----------------------------------------
> Subject: RE: [Histling-l] sound replacement in loans
> Date: Sun, 16 Dec 2007 14:17:06 -0600
> From: rankin at ku.edu
> To: histling-l at mailman.rice.edu
> 
> I understand the copyright constraints you are operating under, but I'm afraid that probably most of us would need a little more information in order to attempt to answer your query.  If the example you have in mind is, say, polysyllabic and there are several attractive phonetic matches between your projected source and recipient words, the replacement of "sh" with "%" (the pharyngeal stop) would pose an interesting problem.  If, however, the posited source and loan have approximately the form you give an example, e.g, VshV to V%V, then I might tend to question whether it is really a borrowing or merely a chance resemblance.  Even if the semantic match is exact, the VCV is pretty short for us to be certain.  
>  
> The only case I can think of that is even close is a change within a single language:  15th century Spanish "sh" (written "x") evolving into modern Spanish /x/ varying dialectally with /h/.  The velar or laryngeal is at least a little closer, but is never a stop.
>  
> Best wishes,
>  
> Robert L. Rankin
> University of Kansas
> 
> ________________________________
> 
> From: histling-l-bounces at mailman.rice.edu on behalf of Wolfgang Schulze
> Sent: Sun 12/16/2007 1:29 AM
> To: histling-l at mailman.rice.edu
> Subject: [Histling-l] sound replacement in loans
> 
> 
> Dear friends,
> Claire Bowern had suggested to post my following question (originally addressed to the LINGTYP list) to HISTLING, too.:
> 
> Within the context of my research on Caucasian Albanian (Old Udi), I  came across a rather remarkable instance of 'sound replacement' in loans: A palatal voiceless fricative () is (systematically?) replaced by a voiced pharyngeal stop. I wonder whether some of you have come across a parallel process in other languages...To be more concrete: What I have in mind are cases of replacement within loans (!), not sound changes within the history of a given language. That is, Language A has a  in a term that is borrowed into Language B with a voiced pharyngeal (I write 
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