yeli-renrong:

According to Hitch 2016, intervocalic /d g/ in Khotanese merge as /ʔ/. 

Assuming Hitch’s interpretation is correct, the obvious intermediate steps are d g > ð ɣ > 0, VV > VʔV - but Khotanese also had /ð/, which contrasted with early /d/ in intervocalic position and was unaffected by this shift.

Wouldn’t it be funny if this instead represented ejective debuccalization? The Khotanese writing system is already creative with Brahmic conventions (e.g. <kṣ> /tʂ̩ʰ/*, <p b tt t d> /b β t d ð/), so maybe Hitch’s voiced stops could be reinterpreted as ejectives.

(Cf. the reinterpretation of Tocharian *d > ts as the more sensible *tʼ > *tsʼ > ts, although I’m not entirely convinced of *d > ts.)

This probably isn’t possible due to loanword evidence, but PIE ejectives would’ve had to been interpreted as similar to voiced stops for them to become voiced stops in most branches anyway, and the glottalic explanation for Sindhi implosives already requires glottal activity to be preserved into (and well past) Indo-Iranian.

* Hitch says /tʂ/, but it merges with /ʈʰ/ later

Debuccalization would match how also standard PIr. *-f- *-θ- *-x- > h (with these being from PII aspirated *pʰ *tʰ *kʰ)… unfortunately though, Hitch’s /ʔ/ is not from PIE *d *g, but rather Common Middle Iranian medial *d *g < PIr. = PIE *t *k (while PIr. medial *d *g, < PIE *d *g × *dʰ *gʰ, lenite across East Iranian to *ð *ɣ).

yeli-renrong:

Update: After examining some spectrograms, it appears that the White Hmong sound represented by RPA dh might be exactly this anomalous sound: a prevoiced voiceless aspirated (alveolar) stop!

Presumably [dtʰ] as in Kelabit - has anyone investigated the diachronic origin of this sound? (Have the Indo-Europeanists?)

Sure they have, it’s even right there in Weiss’ original presentation on the “Cao Bang Theory”. Goes back to Blust (2006) [x] per whom they come via voiced geminates, which arise from earlier C+stop clusters (*butbut > *bubbut > bubpʰut ‘to pluck’, *dakdak >*daddak > dədtʰak 'to tamp’) and post-schwa gemination (*bəduk > *bədduk > bədtʰuk 'monkey sp.’, *təbuh > *təbbu > təbpʰu 'sugarcane’, *kəzəp > *kəjjəp > kədtʰəp 'to blink’). These can be reconstructed also more widely, tending towards fully voiceless and possibly spirantized reflexes across the North Sarawak languages.

Some of the cases of implosives maybe split off before *BB > *BPʰ (note Kenyah varieties also lacking spirantization of stops); though Long San Kenyah at least just looks like general implosion of all voiced stops.

Interestingly, per Blust’s data appendix there seem to be zero native Malayo-Polynesian examples of /gkʰ/, and also only one that could be reconstructed even for Proto-North Sarawak or a major NS subgroup; *məgʰən 'to sleep’.

… edit: yeah you were obviously asking about the source of Hmongdh; I’ve slept badly, but I guess this was a nice refresher to put together

From@yeli-renrong:

Are there examples from outside the Sichuan/Yunnan/Tibet area of the development of postocclusion, as in ɬ ɮ > ɬtʰ ɮd? Is this even diachronically correct, or is postocclusion here a retention after a development of e.g. *l.t- > ɬᵗ?

Examples of “suffricates” as an etymologically single segment aren’t exactly common in general of course. At least Bulgarian / Old Church Slavonic *ť *ď > št žd and (some?) Ancient Greek *ď > †zd are diachronically clear cases. If Sino-Caucasianists are on to anything, Burushaski has t-:-lt- from earlier *tɬ. None of these, though, come from a fricative. So yes maybe suggestions of earlier *ɬ *ɮ are indeed simply incorrect and should be rather *lt- *ld- or *tl- *dl- or *tɬ- *dɮ-. The development of Written Tibetan zl- to some varieties’ /ld-/ might then be simply routed as fortition to *dl (additionally via *zdl if wanted) plus metathesis. Per Hill (2011: 446) this metathesis has been already proposed long since by Simon in 1929. Or maybe that should be rather Proto-Tibetic *zl-, since this metathesis seems to precede WT!

Tangentially on the topic, Awngi has notably been described as having /s͡t ʃ͡t/, similar to affricates in occurring at syllable boundaries even word-internally. They also fail to be ever broken up by epenthetic [ɨ], but at least this argument is not followed consistently: other homorganic clusters like /mb/ or /rt/ are tolerated within a syllable too; moreover, both the “prestopped fricatives” and certain “tolerated clusters” trigger epenthesis of initial [ɨ]. There does not seem to be evidence for an earlier monophonemic origin. It looks to me that allowing minor complication in syllable structure (existence of some cases of -CC.C- not epenthesized to -CCɨC- or -CɨCC-) would be a better analysis than positing fairly exceptional contour consonants, which brings to my mind the weird Africanist style of analyses that sometimes suggest even clusters like /kɾ/ to be “single consonants”.

For that matter, a strictly epenthetic nature of [ɨ] is not tenable for modern-day Awngi anyway: this analysis is originally due to Joswig, who however admits that it is (1) not followed by loanwords from Amharic, (2) not followed by the native noun [sɨsqi] ‘sweat’ (**[ɨssɨqi]), (3) bled by a proposed degemination of a variety of consonants. All these problems would seem to be solved by treating epenthesis of /ɨ/ as a historical sound change and not a synchronic process.

Whither Uvulars

Now that I got to checking up on Oceanic Linguistics, their early release articles seem to have an interesting one by Blevins currently: “Uvular Reflexes of Proto-Austronesian *q: Mysterious Disappearance or Drift Toward Oblivion?” wherein she points out that Proto-Austronesian *q is much more unstable than should be expected.

Differing regular reflexes like *q > k or *q > ʔ establish that this must have remained as its own segment as late as until Proto-Oceanic and various other great-grand-daughter groups. Yet, out of a four-digit number of descendants, there are no more than two languages outside of Taiwan that have a /q/ that seems to come from *q (even one of them, upon reanalysis, apparently instead first merging *k and *q and then backing this *k to /q/ in various environments). Worldwide, uvulars are not all that rare, found in about 20% of languages. So Austronesian is off from the world average here by a factor of 100!

After rejecting a few other hypotheses involving e.g. functional load or language contact effects, Blevins settles on a hypothesis of conditional in/stability of uvulars, which sounds believable to me:

A more relevant structural factor that appears to be strongly correlated with /q/ versus /k/ contrasts is the size and shape of the vowel system. In language families like Semitic, Quechuan, and Eskimo–Aleut (aka Inuit–Yupik- Unangan), where uvular versus velar stop contrasts are reconstructable to the proto-language, and continued robustly, reconstructed vowel systems are small, and are also continued in most daughter languages (…) One possible explanation for the association between small peripheral vowel systems and velar versus uvular stop contrasts relates to perceptual cues of uvulars on adjacent vowels: uvulars are often described with significant “lowering” and “backing” effects on neighboring vowels, so that /i/ might be heard as [e], or /u/ as [o] before a uvular (…) in five vowel systems like /i u e o a/, lowering effects of uvulars would be less salient, or could be mistaken for intrinsic vowel properties.

This checks out also within Austronesian:

The PAN vowel system, as we have seen, was one with three peripheral vowels *i, *u, *a, and one central vowel, *ə. Interestingly, the Formosan languages that show uvular reflexes of *q are precisely those that have either retained the PAN four-vowel system or reduced it further to a three-vowel system with /i u a/.

[B]y PCEMP the vowel system had expanded to *i, *u, *e, *o, *a, *ə (with five peripheral vowels), later reduced to *i, *u, *e, *o, *a in Proto-South Halmahera–West New Guinea and POC (Blust 1993:247). If the *q versus *k contrast was dependent on pho- netic cues that were best realized in a vowel system with /i, u, a, (ə)/, then the expansion of the PCEMP vowel system might be seen as an important structural factor determining a drift away from /q/ in all descendant languages.

I can add that the languages I know with uvulars + large vowel systems (Siberian Uralic and various adjacent Turkic) seem to keep tight reins on the co-occurrence of uvulars and different vowels, often maintaining [q] as a mere “syllable harmonic” allophone of /k/ before back vowels. The case of Northern Khanty and Northern Mansi is also interesting, with a major vowel system collapse leading to a well-loaded /k/ : /χ/ (< *q) contrast. We find generally smallish vowel inventories plus robust uvular inventories also in e.g. NW Caucasian and more northern parts of Na-Dene; also Proto-Indo-European if the “plain velars” were treated as uvulars. Kartvelian might count as an example of sorts of this instability of uvulars, showing vowel systems with 5 or more members + original *q merging with /x/ in 3 languages out of 4. (/qʼ/ remains stable though; and it is also noted by Blevins that languages that have uvulars are also more likely to have ejectives.)

Counterexamples do still exist. NE Caucasian, at least, is a decently large family with sometimes quite large vowel systems and universally maintaining a large stock of uvulars. Cushitic languages also tend to have at least all of basic /a e i o u/ even when having uvulars (be they Awngi or Iraqw or Somali). But then most do not have them, and we could also consider /q/ rather than /kʼ/ being recent rub-off from Arabic in many of them.

—

There is one possible hypothesis that seems to me to have escaped consideration, though: intermediate development? Perhaps, in some major intermediate languages like Proto-Oceanic, *q had changed to a reflex that was no longer a uvular stop but also not yet any of the most common reflexes — for example, an epiglottal stop *ʡ (attested as a reflex of *q in Amis) or a voiceless uvular fricative *χ, that probably should be expected to often decay to various glottal consonants or zero, but maybe could be still also sometimes re-fronted to reflexes like a velar stop /k/ or a velar fricative /ɣ/. Are there any areal tendencies in the frequency of velar (fronted) versus glottal etc. (backed) reflexes of *q across Austronesian? If yes, that might be a point in favor of this explanation.