LINGUIST List 4.621

Thu 19 Aug 1993

Disc: Lateral Affricates

Editor for this issue: <>

Directory

1. , Lateralized affricates

I have received a number of queries regarding my query about the
origin of lateralized coronal affricates, asking for the context,
so here goes. Briefly, Nahuatl (Uto-Aztecan) tl was shown by
Whorf in the 1930's to come from Proto-UA *t before the vowel a.
I believe I can now show that this also happens before Proto-Aztecan
high back unrounded vowel (derived from PUA *u), so that we may
say that t -> tl before back unrounded (i.e., velar) vowels.
Because of this, I got the idea that the original sound change
may have been a velarization of the coronal stop (i.e., *t -> *tx)
and that the velar release was later replaced by a lateral one
(i.e., *tx -> tl). It would be interesting to know if therea
are any crosslinguistic arguments for or against this proposal.