- David R. Mortensen. 2004. The Emergence of Dorsal Stops after High Vowels in Huishu. Abstract: 0. Introduction Huishu, a Tibeto-Burman language of Manipur belonging to the Tangkhul group, features an unusual sound change in which dorsal stop codas are inserted after high vowels in open syllables. Thus PTB *s@y > PTk > *k@.thi > Huishu k@.tik ‘to die’. This development seems both formally and functionally aberrant: epenthesis usually inserts vowels, and consonant epenthesis, when it does occur, usually inserts glides (Blevins to appear).1 I propose that this change and others like it were not motivated by either formal or functional factors. Rather, they result from the conjunction of aerodynamic, acoustic, and perceptual facts, which lead to a systematic misperception (and thus, misinterpretation) of the forms involved in these innovations. This model, I argue, is able to account not only for the general facts surrounding the emergence of consonants after high vowels, but is also able to account for speci c facts of this phenomenon in Huishu.
