Application of the comparative method to Nivkh

Other regular sound correspondences

Abstract

The Nivkh language family of Sakhalin Island and the adjacent mainland in Northeast Asia is generally considered to be without known external relatives, and since its internal diversity is relatively shallow— leading some authors to treat it as a single ‘language’ divisible only into ‘dialect’-level varieties—comparative linguistics internal to the family has been neglected. The internal diversity of Nivkh is not, however, as trivial as has been portrayed, and involves at least two (Gruzdeva, 1998) and possibly three (Fortescue, 2016) mutually unintelligible varieties, indicating fertile ground for the application of the Standard Comparative Method within the family. Following up on our previous work (Halm, 2017), in which we examined the synchronic sound correspondences and diachronic sound changes pertaining to vocoid sequences, in the present paper we adduce and examine other sound correspondences and attempt to define their underlying diachronic developments. Our clearest findings include: Proto-Nivkh (PN) /*a/ > Amur Nivkh (AN), West Sakhalin Nivkh (WSN), and perhaps North Sakhalin Nivkh (NSN) /ǝ/ when adjacent to or tautosyllabic with a velar consonant and not prohibited by vowel harmony or similar adjacency to a post-velar consonant; PN /*i/ > AN, WSN /ǝ/ | /[t,d]__+/; PN /*mx, *mχ/ > AN, WSN /ŋk/; PN /*ŋq/ > AN, WSN /ŋk/ morphemefinally, and probably in all positions; PN /*χ/ > AN, WSN /x/ | /o(C)__/; PN clusters of a palatal and an alveolar consonant generally assimilate to alveolar articulation for both segments, both historically and synchronically, in East Sakhalin Nivkh (ESN) and South Sakhalin Nivkh (SSN); morpheme-initial clusters with a lenis PN initial consonant are shifted to fortis articulation in SSN; PN velar fricatives /*x/ > Nogliki Nivkh (NgN), SSN /χ/ when preceded in a cluster by /c(h), t(h)/ (with some other conditioning differing between NgN and SSN); and finally, we confirm some sound changes already observed individually in the literature, and refute or question others. We also briefly discuss the phylogeny of the attested varieties in light of shared historical sound changes. Keywords: sound change, assimilation, fortition, Nivkh