Re: OT: Junk

H. S. Teoh scripsit:

> Interesting. Assuming that they have a common ancestor language, I wonder
> how this would have come about. It's quite fascinating that the nasality
> of the sound can be preserved even though the speakers probably don't have
> a conscious concept of nasality as such.
I would guess that Mandarin and Min nasalization are probably independent.
Middle Chinese (i.e. reconstructed Tang dynasty Chinese) is not usually
reconstructed with nasal vowels, but there were three nasal endings, -m -n -N.
Allowing any of these to be reduced to nasalization is fairly straightforward
and could have happened independently in the history of each Sinitic language:
Mandarin has reduced the opposition to -n vs. -N, whereas in Shanghainese
there is only one, conventionally labeled /-N/ but which is very often
realized as nasalization.

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