Patterns of Allophony
Author: William S. Annis
MS Date: 02-23-2015
FL Date: 04-01-2015
FL Number: FL-00002B-00
Citation: Annis, William S. 2015. “Patterns of Allophony.”
FL-00002B-00, Fiat Lingua,
Copyright: © 2015 William S. Annis. This work is licensed
under a Creative Commons Attribution-
NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/
Fiat Lingua is produced and maintained by the Language Creation Society (LCS). For more information
about the LCS, visit http://www.conlang.org/
Patterns of Allophony
William S. Annis
February 23, 2015
This is a small collection of common allophones taken from the PBase database1, presented
as graphs. In making these graphs I have focused on selecting patterns that occur more than
once, or which are part of a larger pattern that occurs more than once. For example, in some
languages /l/ will present as [d] after nasals. In fewer languages both /r/ and /l/ will do this, so
I include them both. I have tried to leave out one-off exotica, but one or two might have slipped
through if they struck me as especially interesting.
I have omitted certain very common changes. For example, voicing assimilation of any kind
is left out for consonant clusters, and do I not include either nasal assimilation or word-final
devoicing.
I have also left out all patterns of deletion, which are also largely predictable (as
codas, word-finally, etc.).
Reading the Graphs
Arrows indicate the direction of change. The environment in which the change occurs is indi-
cated by the grey text to the left of the line. So, in the selection below, note that /t/ becomes [θ]
before /p/, /t/, and /k/, but becomes the glottal stop [ʔ] word finally.
The environments are given in fairly standard notation: C is a consonant, V a vowel, N any nasal
consonant, # is a word boundary, and the underline represents the sound itself. Curly braces
enclose a set of phonemes. So, the notation _# marks a change that occurs at the end of a word,
_{w,j}V marks a change that occurs when the sound is followed by either /w/ or /j/ and then a
vowel, and #_{i,e} marks a change that happens at the start of a word and followed by either /i/
or /e/.
1(cid:63)(cid:105)(cid:105)(cid:84)(cid:44)(cid:102)(cid:102)(cid:84)(cid:35)(cid:28)(cid:98)(cid:50)(cid:88)(cid:35)(cid:96)(cid:81)(cid:63)(cid:28)(cid:77)(cid:88)(cid:43)(cid:28)(cid:102)(cid:91)(cid:109)(cid:50)(cid:96)(cid:118)
1
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