vol 12/issue 2 - Sound replacement in loans

[R=?ISO-8859-1?B?6Q==?=my Viredaz]

Dear Wolfgang,

After seeing the various contributions, my guess is rather near that of
Marie-Lucie Tarpent.

The shortest path from  sh  to the voiced pharyngeal stop seems to be:

- voicing at one stage or the other

- sh or zh develops to a retroflex and further to a velar fricative: to the
Spanish and Poitou/Vendée parallels one can add Swedish, where the sound
spelt as sj, stj, skj or sk (sk only before a stressed front vowl) was
taught as a retroflex  sh  in McClean, Teach Yourself Swedish, but is now a
sort of  x  as far as I can hear it occasionally on TV. (There is also *sh >
x in Slavic, but here  *sh  belongs to an unattested period.)
Retroflection of  sh  (with or without furtehr development to  x )
apparently occurs only in systems with three manners of sibilants or the
like: e. g. Spanish  z  (alveolar  s , today  interdental) :: apical  s  ::
hushing   x ; Swedish  ç  (palatal x, spelt kj, tj ; I don't know if today
it's a palatal  x  or a palatal  sh ) :: sh  (spelt sj etc. as above, but
obviously depalatalized for some time already) :: s.

- velar fricatives to pharyngeal fricatives : this is known in the
development from (unattested) Proto-Semitic to e. g. Hebrew, and from Arabic
to Maltese.

- voiced pharyngeal fricative to voiced pharyngeal stop: is this possible ?

However, that makes many changes, and all of these would have to have
occurred in the recipient language after the loans, rather than as
adaptations at the time of the loans. And any of them may be possible or
impossible depending on the rest of the consonant system, and, of course, on
what is already known of its historical phonology on the basis of comparison
with related languages.

Best wishes,


Rémy Viredaz
1, rue Chandieu
CH - 1202 Genève
remy.viredaz at bluewin.ch



> 
> Message: 1
> Date: Sun, 16 Dec 2007 08:29:10 +0100
> From: Wolfgang Schulze <W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de>
> Subject: [Histling-l] sound replacement in loans
> To: histling-l at mailman.rice.edu
> Message-ID: <4764D3C6.7060207 at lrz.uni-muenchen.de>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
> 
> 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 (<sh>) 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 <sh> in a term that is borrowed into Language B with a voiced
> pharyngeal (I write <%>) instead, say /asha/ in Language A (donor
> language) > /a%a/ in Language B (recipient language). [Unfortunately,
> I'm not allowed to give concrete examples from Caucasian Albanian, as
> long as the corresponding text (the so-called Caucasian Albanian
> Palimpsest) has not been edited. Sorry for this! But I have to respect
> the copyright of others....]
> Thanks for any suggestions....
> Best wishes,
> Wolfgang


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