Asst. Professor at UC Berkeley | Speech & Computation Lab Director | Interpretable Generative AI
Sound patterns in human languages are usually pretty simple. But sometimes they work in highly unusual ways. In some languages, word-final stops like [b] or [d] turn into nasals like [m] or [n]. A paper to appear in Glossa (by Maksymilian Dabkowski & me) uncovers a complex history behind this seemingly simple but unusual process. The paper shows that the blurring process is a useful tool for approaching unusual sound correspondences: We argue final nasalization results from four sound changes; (i) fricativization of voiced stops, (ii) devoicing of the fricatives, (iii) spontaneous nasalization before voiceless fricatives, and (iv) occlusion of the nasalized fricatives to nasal stops. Unnatural phonological patterns are among the most informative for understanding the relative influences of cultural transmission vs. cognition on sound patterns in human languages. The paper by the amazing Maksymilian Dabkowski and me: https://lnkd.in/eG8yggnb
