Hakka

{ 20040710,2133 | Roger Mills } Any idea or info on how that happened?
AFAIK other Chinese languages have /m n N/ for sure initially,
sometimes as coda. Presumably Sino-Tibetan had */m n N/ too????

Although an ex of mine was a native Hakka-speaker, I have no personal
familiarity with Hakka (Mandarin "Kejia"). (She spoke in Singaporean
Malay when she code-switched around me.) And Ramsey (Languages of
China) lists three minimal nasal phonemes, [m] [n] & [N], the last of
which appears as /N/ before all vowels except [i], where it appears as
/J/. In addition, it lists nasals appearing in coda.

Presumably, as happened in Basque, Lushootsheed & the Salishan language
listed, nasals went to prenasalised stops. What happened to nasals in
coada is a mystery: I would have expected that, as is normal in the SE
Chinese "linguistic area", coda nasals would have become nasalised
vowels.

Let me clarify: in Chinese linguistics, there are INITIALS and CODAS.
The coda includes a vowel; sample Mandarin codas are -a and -ang.
Therefore, when I say 'coda nasals > nasalised vowels' i don't mean a
new vowel was created, but that the existing vowel of the coda was
nasalised.

How the heck this can happen with a language in which the standard
dialect, Meixian, has (as is common to languages in China) syllables
with ONLY codas: for example, the word [ N ] (tone unmarked) clearly
has [ syllabicity + ] but a theoretical form which was a prenasalised
stop alone would be [ syllabicity - ].

I'm unclear whether I'm clear, but it's late. And "Aqua Teen Hunger
Force" is driving me insane. So forgive.

em'ly
********
EMILY0
http://homepage.mac.com/cafewrack

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