Minor Mordvinic mutations, part 1
The phonology of the Mordvinic languages is, from a historical point of view, deceivingly simple. While they cannot really be called "archaic" in the same sense Finnish has been, the group is rather short on any characteristic phonological features. Sure, there have been a couple general innovations — but most of these are shared widely with the other Uralic languages. The spirants *ð, *ðʲ, *x and the velar nasal *ŋ (though the last one is reported from dialectal Erzya around the beginning of the 1900s; no idea if it's still kicking) were quite volatile consonants and them having merged with other consonants like *t or *j is not a big surprize. The same applies to the "umlaut" vowels *ü and *ë. The lenition of word-medial voiceless consonants followed by shortening of geminates (to reintroduce intervocalic [p, t, k]) is found from all the neighbors: Mari, Permic, the now relocated Hungarian, and even the Finnic Veps. The shift *w → *v has at some point hit approximately every language west of the Atlantic, east of the Urals and north of the Caucasus. Reduction and/or loss of final vowels is one of the most common sound changes in any language anywhere.
The principal common Mordvinic innovation that can actually be seen in the phoneme inventories may be the rampant palatalization. The Proto-Uralic contrast between *n : *ń and *s : *ś (the corresponding contrast among the spirants did not survive) has been extended with /ť, ď, ŕ, ĺ/: even then this is actually only minimally phonemic, in the vicinity of back vowels, thanks to a couple changes like *rj → *ŕ. Palatalized allophones of all other consonants exist as well… but still only as allophones. This is quite unlike language groups like Romance, Slavic or Indo-Aryan, where palatalized consonants like *kʲ have typically only hung around for a short while before deciding to decay into a multitude of sibilants and affricates. Perhaps because Mordvinic already has a multitude, being one of the two Uralic branches to retain the three-way distinction between PU *s, *ś and *š.
The shift away from initial stress also probably counts. This is most strikingly reflected in words where initial consonant clusters have arisen — words like Erzya /kštada/ "bare" or Mokša /fkä/ "1" would be a challenge for speakers of most Uralic languages.
But beyond these, Mordvinic has been content to spend its "sound change quota" on "minor" sound changes that simply shuffle around the phonemes. No large-scale sibilant mergers as in Mari. No vowel length has arisen as in Finnic or Ugric. No denasalization of clusters as in Permic, Hungarian and West Samic, no consonant gradation as in Finnic and Samic, no cluster metatheses as in Permic and Ugric, no spirantization of initial stops as in Hungarian, most of Samoyedic and northern Ob-Ugric. One could say that Mordvinic sounds essentially like Proto-Uralic spoken with a heavy Russian accent. (Then again, given that Uralic was there first, maybe saying that Russian sounds essentially like Proto-Slavic spoken with a heavy Mordvinic accent would be more accurate.)
…OK, I was going somewhere else with this, but it's late and I'm getting sidetracked. Let's try again tomorrow.
