Voiced Fricative Lenition in Kantrë
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Excerpt from a commentary on phonological changes observed in Kantrë, written by Kantrian linguist Nalhinis Lyvust
This public article was written by [Deactivated User], and last updated on 27 Jun 2021, 07:27.
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This article is a work in progress! Check back later in case any changes have occurred.
This article is a work in progress! Check back later in case any changes have occurred.
It has been known for at least three centuries that Kantrian speakers do not favour the voiced fricatives; /v/, /ð/ and /ɣ/. A slow process of voice fricative lenition has been going on for approximately half a millenium, which has resulted in the modern Kantrian realisation of voiced fricatives as their equivalent (voiced) approximants; /ʋ/, /ð̞/ and /ɰ/. In Kentÿ, this lenition takes place consistently on voiced fricatives found in the onset of an unstressed syllable and, furthermore, the combination of these fricatives with the ever abundant labio-velar approximant yields further mutations. However, in Taqÿ, whose divergence from Kentÿ has been noted by linguists for as early as 70 years ago, this lenition occurs on all environments and often leads to a loss of a given voiced fricative altogether.
It is the significance of this last aspect of voiced fricative lenition that I would like to elaborate on in this next section. Kantrë has very strict rules about consonant clusters, allowing only specific types, with a lot of them being the result of an unstressed vowel drop and would otherwise not occur in Kantrian words. In general, Kantrë prefers open syllables to closed ones, which means that intervocallic consonants are abundant, including fricatives. Moreover, Kantrë does not have any naturally occuring diphthongs, something which has been maintained even in loanwords that do have them. Historically, we have transcribed these foreign diphthongs using a combination of long vowels and the labio-velar approximant; indeed, the latter combined with a vowel is the closest our language gets to producing a diphthong.
At this point you might have foreseen where I am going with this. Intervocallic voiced fricatives are anything but rare and due to their ever-increasing lenition in Taqÿ it is very common for them to be lenited to the point of loss; therefore the vowel that precedes the lost fricative and the one that follows it have the potential to form a diphthong (or a long vowel, if they are the same vowel), which would happen for the first time in the recorded history of Kantrë. This could be a momentous turn of events, and can lead our language down one of many possible paths, perhaps as far as causing a second spell reform, such as that of the last millenium, when rounded vowels emerged in our speech.
To demonstrate this point, allow me to take the example of the word "kydaraspe", which is pronounced [keð̞ɐ'ɾɐspœ] in Kentÿ but [keɐ'ɾɐspœ] in Taqÿ. Now, here lies the issue: would Kantrian speakers consider /eɐ/ to be two separate syllables? That seems like the most likely scenario in the first stages after the loss of /ð̞/. However, I suspect that this cannot last for very long and that /eɐ/ will turn into a gliding vowel, for reasons that will be explained later. As a result, we have some interesting prospects in the long term, one of which is that /eɐ/ will converge to a long vowel, such as /e:/, /ɛ:/ or even /æ:/. The other option would, instead, see the introduction of the sound /j/, as /eɐ/ could turn into /jɐ/, due to /e/ being a front vowel. On that note, a vowel sequence such as /ue/ would easily turn into /we/ or /ʍe/, depending on the context.
Now let me take a second example of a more peculiar case, that of the word "fygï", which is pronounced [feɰy] in Kentÿ but with a variety of ways in Taqÿ. ✎ Edit Article ✖ Delete Article
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