Diachronica - Volume 39, Issue 3, 2022

Language contact between migrating Bantu speakers and resident Khoisan speakers has resulted in the adoption of clicks in various southern African Bantu languages. This paper uses the comparative method to show that for one particular cluster of Bantu click languages, the Nguni languages, a large number of phonemic clicks can be reconstructed to its putative ancestor Proto-Nguni, including a palatal click rarely found in Bantu languages and no longer used as such in any living Nguni language. Although clicks have undergone subsequent developments in individual Nguni languages, no new click phonemes were acquired through language contact, showing that clicks were already present very early in the history of the Nguni languages. This relative chronology provides new insights into how the relations between Bantu- and Khoisan-speaking communities in southern Africa developed over time.

In this article, we investigate the diachronic developments that gave rise to final auxiliaries – a hallmark of head-final syntax – in Asia Minor Greek, a cluster of Greek varieties originally spoken in the area historically known as Asia Minor (present-day Anatolia, Turkey) within the recent developments of the generative framework, i.e., the minimalist program. We propose that the original source for the final auxiliaries in Asia Minor Greek is to be found in Hellenistic Greek conditionals, whereas it can be traced back to Medieval Greek pluperfects. The role of contact with Anatolian Turkish is limited to rendering the available – albeit pragmatically marked – Verb-Auxiliary as the only available order. Importantly, this bottom-up change did not switch Asia Minor Greek from harmonic head-initial to harmonic head-final, but, rather, made it a mixed-directionality language. In minimalist terms, we propose that attrition, one of the ways that language contact manifests itself, targets SEM-uninterpretable features; from this point onwards contact may or may not ensue depending on the feature (mis)match between the two languages.

Apparently disparate sound changes in Latin, involving both vowels and consonants but sensitive to /r/, can be explained by reconstructing a positional clear/dark contrast in /r/, motivated by the seldom-mentioned “liquid polarity” effect. Examining these diachronic processes together allows us to see a larger picture, providing evidence for the reconstruction of successive past synchronic states. Latin /r/ mirrored the behaviour of Latin /l/ up to the first century BC: /l/ was dark and /r/ was clear in codas, and /r/ was dark and /l/ was underspecified for tongue body position in onsets. Darkness in /r/ was partly implemented through the selection of r-type: dark onset approximant and clear coda tap. Later, coda /r/ became an approximant like onset /r/, and subsequently both became trills, resulting in the erosion of the positional contrast and the liquid polarity effect.