🚀 go-pugleaf

hubey@pilot.njin.net (Hubey) writes:


>The Chuvash language is known as a 'lir' Turkish vs almost
>all the rest which are 'shaz' languages. The 'sh', 'a' and
>'z' in most Turkic languages become 'l','i','r' in this
>group.

>I can't understand how the 'sh' became an 'l', though. Is
>there any occurances of this in other languages ?

Strange. I know of at least one case of change in the other
direction (l --> sh), and that is in Picard, the French
dialect spoken in the region of Amiens. That change seems
natural enough: from lateral to lateral fricative, then
devoiced. Z to r is also strange; once again, it's usually
the other way around as far as I know, e.g. French chaire
--> chaise, and, if memory serves, Latin r --> s.
Off-hand, I can't think of cases of a regular change of
sh into l, or of z into r. Could it be that it is Chuvash
that has been the conservative one, phonologically?