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As the Wikipedia article on reduplication states, "There is a tendency for prefixing reduplicants to copy left-to-right and for suffixing reduplicants to copy right-to-left". But there are counterexam …

Y is often called a reflex, though that term is used not just for sounds but also for morphemes or words: e.g. you can say that the French reflex of Latin /k/ before /a/ is /ʃ/, or that the French ref …

Phonemes are a theoretical construct, so the answer will depend to some extent on one's theoretical preferences; note that even for PIE many scholars posit independent vowel phonemes /i u/. But basica …

This book seems to answer your question in great detail. From the Amazon description: This scholarly treatise designed for linguists and typographers contains comprehensive statistics of conjunct con …

I would like to get a handle on the difference between the concepts of phonological phrase and intonational phrase, as used in contemporary phonological theory. How do phonologists define these two te …

Deciding between a cluster analysis and a coarticulation analysis when the two do not phonemically contrast is always to some extent a matter of analytical choice, so there's no general answer to your …

There's any number of possible sounds in human languages that have not been reconstructed for PIE, because no one's seen any reason to reconstruct them. There's no specific argument for reconstructing …

I'm looking for sound files that illustrate the distinction between the two pitch contours of long vowels and diphthongs in Lithuanian, e.g. kóšė (falling pitch) vs. kõšė (rising pitch). Does anyone k …

Many or most Indic languages possess voiceless aspirated stops. Cross-linguistically, such stops often turn into fricatives: e.g., in Indo-European, this happened in Greek, in Iranian, and probably in …

Familiar cases of metathesis involve segments changing places, but metathesis can also operate at the subsegmental level, affecting individual features. I'm specifically interested in metathesis of PO …

It is dissimilation, or more specifically loss by dissimilation. There are two [l] sounds in the word originally, and one of them dissimilates to zero, i.e. is lost. This is a common type of sound cha …

This cites an article by Bessell (1992) arguing that Nlakapmxcin, a Northwest Coast language, has allophonically aspirated glottal stops. Tinputz, a language of Papue New Guinea, is claimed here to h …

The loss of intervocalic s is one of the defining features of Proto-Greek: that is, it occurred before the earliest attested Greek and is common to all the Greek dialects. It is thought to have gone t …

Which, if any, of the world's languages have both the following features? Syllable-initial vowels are disallowed; all syllables must begin with a consonant. There is no glottal stop phoneme.

As a conjecture, it seems possible that the generalized rough breathing before #u- has to do with the cross-linguistic tendency for high vowels to produce extra turbulence, which can then be phonologi …