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The sound change *s- > n- in Arapaho
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Guillaume Jacques
Published/Copyright:
October 16, 2013
Abstract
The sound change *s > n in initial position in Arapaho is unparalleled in the world’s languages, and previous attempts at explaining it have failed to produce a convincing account of its intermediate stages. This article presents two hypotheses to account for the correspondence between PA *s- and Arapaho n-, taking into account not only the individual steps of this particular proto-phoneme, but the evolution of the whole consonant system. It shows that the change *s > n in initial position only appears to reflect an unnatural development: it can in fact be explained in terms of a sequence of natural changes and mergers.
Published Online: 2013-10-16
Published in Print: 2013-10
© 2013 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Masthead
- Attribution in Romance: Reconstructing the oral and written tradition
- The sound change *s- > n- in Arapaho
- Language vs. grammatical tradition in Ancient India: How real was Pāṇinian Sanskrit?
- The early Middle English reflexes of Germanic *ik ‘I’: Unpacking the changes
- Copularisation processes in French: Constructional intertwining, lexical attraction, and other dangerous things
- The Northern Subject Rule in first-person singular contexts in fourteenth-fifteenth-century Scots
- Early progressive passives
- Participant continuity and narrative structure: Defining discourse marker functions in Old English
- Book Reviews
