A panchronic study of aspirated fricatives, with new evidence from Pumi

Aspirated fricatives are typologically uncommon sounds, only found in a handful of languages. This paper studies the diachronic pathways leading to the creation of aspirated fricatives. A review of the literature brings out seven such historical pathways. An eighth, heretofore unreported pattern of change is revealed by Shuiluo Pumi, a Sino-Tibetan language spoken in China. These diachronic data have non-trivial implications for phonological modelling as well as for the synchronic typology of sound patterns. First, they provide new evidence for the debate concerning the definition of the feature [+spread glottis]. Second, they explain some of the typological properties of aspirated fricatives, in particular the absence of aspirated fricatives in consonant clusters and the rarity of non-coronal aspirated fricatives.