The class of semivowels in Sanskrit

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In Sanskrit, both liquids /l r/ and glides /j w/ alternate with their syllabic counterparts and form a single class of semivowels in the traditional grammar. The four semivowels, however, show distinct behaviors in various phonological processes. That is, in consonantclusters, /w/ but not the others may occur before another semivowel in the onset. As a target of sandhis, final /r/ merges with the dental sibilant /s/ in most contexts. As a trigger of sandhis, /l/ showscomparable behaviors to oral stops in causing oral gesture assimilation while /r/ tends to cause debuccalization of the preceding consonant. In gemination, /w/ and /l/ may become the target instead of the adjacent non-continuant while /r/ is excluded from the target. In Middle Indo-Aryan assimilation and initial cluster simplification, the four semivowels show different degrees of resistance to loss.Asymmetrical behaviors of semivowels are attributed to the phonetic differences of these four sounds instead of the universal feature system, sonority, or the prosodic structure. The phonetic properties that lead to idiosyncratic behaviors are: /l/ with a lingual contact in parallelwith stops, /w/ realized as a voiced fricative instead of an approximant, and /r/ with a wider aperture than the other three semivowels. These articulatory properties lead to the hierarchy /l/ < /w/ < /j/ < /r/ with an ascending order of vocalicity, which in turn dominates theirphonological behaviors.

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  • 研究論集

    研究論集 100 1-19, 2014-09

    関西外国語大学・関西外国語大学短期大学部

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