Re: Armenian, Sumerian, Burushaski, and Turkic languages

On 27 May 2007 20:26:54 -0700, "Peter T. Daniels"
<grammatim@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
<news:1180322814.833926.41640@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
in sci.lang:

On May 27, 9:42 pm, Nathan Sanders <nsand...@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

and we even find pure coronal to dorsal shifts, such as
the Austronesian shift of t to k in Hawaiian.

Whoa -- that's not a change, but an underspecification.
Hawaiian and Tahitian (e.g.) have only one non-labial
stop, and the missionaries who created the Tahitian
orthography happened to write it with <t> and the those
who did it for Hawaiian used <k>.

As J.W. Love pointed out a few years ago, it's not that
simple. Sometime around 1800, perhaps a bit later in Samoa,
both Hawaiian and Samoan developed [k] as an optional
realization of /t/, the reflex of Proto-Polynesian /*t/.
(PPN /*k/ > HAW, SAM [?]). In Samoa this led to a register
distinction:

In colloquial pronunciation (used by most people
most of the time), the formal [t] shifts to [k], and
the formal [n] shifts to [N].

The [t] also survived in Samoan singing.

[...]

Brian
.

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