r and s in Turkic

[H.M.Hubey]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Lyle Campbell wrote:
>
>
> results of later sound changes).  Put differently, those with a grasp of
> phonological systems and phonetic plausibility all postulate a change of *s
> > z > r  and  *S > Z > l, where the steps in the change are seen as
> incremental, intimately interrelated, and natural.  No one with a sense of
> phonology postulates the reverse, the unnatural and implausible changes of
> *r > z/s  and  *l > Z/S, which are almost unknown in languages elsewhere
> (Shherbak 1986b, Janhunen personal communication).
 
To put it mildly differently, as can be seen everywhere in phonology
and phonetics the sounds /ptksn/ are "rarely absent" from the world's
languages. If the "natural" change to /r/ and/or /l/ was so natural
we would have had no /s/ left anywhere.
 
Perhaps those who are pushing rhotacization on us have latched on to
some local phenomena (local in both time and space) and think it
is universally applicable or rhotacization does not exist as it is
said to exist but is a substratum/superstratum phenomena and is
once again a local phenomena and not a global one.
 
OTOH, if you are looking at a mixing of a language A with strong
consonant-clusters and rich in fricatives and sibilants with another
language B which is not clustered and is weak in fricatives perhaps
for a period of time, (local in space and time) you could obtain
the (in)famous rhotacization, lambdacization etc.
 
PS. REad Lindblom's works on phonetics and the physics and/or
optimization of sound patterns.
 
 
 
>
> [[From:  Campbell, Lyle. In Press. Nostratic and Linguistic Palaeontology
> in Methodological Perspective. In:  Nostratic: Evaluating a Linguistic
> Macrofamily, ed. by Colin Renfrew and Daniel Nettle.  Cambridge: The
> McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research.]]
 
--
Best Regards,
Mark
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