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Re: OT: Junk

From:John Cowan <jcowan@...>
Date:Tuesday, September 9, 2003, 19:34
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. -- He made the Legislature meet at one-horse John Cowan tank-towns out in the alfalfa belt, so that jcowan@reutershealth.com hardly nobody could get there and most of http://www.reutershealth.com the leaders would stay home and let him go http://www.ccil.org/~cowan to work and do things as he pleased. --Mencken, _Declaration of Independence_