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Re: Nasalized fricatives ...

From:Ray Brown <ray.brown@...>
Date:Friday, December 3, 2004, 7:27
On Thursday, December 2, 2004, at 02:49 , Andreas Johansson wrote:

> I was reviewing Meghean phonlogy earlier today, and it occured to me that > a > series of nasalized fricatives [B~ D~ G~] would be quite the thing to make > would-be learners pull their hair out. They'd occure as initial mutations > of > nasal stops,
Why only initial? Why exclude them from medial & final positions?
> which as an added bonus means the definite form would be less > dysfunctional (indef and def would then only coalesce for words beginning > in /s > l r j w i e/).
But that could surely be still achieved?
> Now, this is a non-human (Elvish) language, so I don't care too much about > violating universals and anadewistic precedent (the lang's got [e] and [o] > but > no [E] or [O], which is apparently already quite unusual), but I'd anyway > like > to know if there's any natlang out there with phonemic nasalized > fricatives. > The only lang I can recall hearing of it in is Sindarin, which, in archaic > stages, had a sound described as "fricative m" or "nasal v" - this must > mean > [v~] or [B~] (very possibly both along the way, since the starting point > was [m] > and the end result [v]).
The sound bilabial and/or labiodental nasalized fricative almost certainly occurred in medieval variants of the Brittonic langs. Breton still retains nasalization of the preceding vowel, tho the fricative AFAIK has no lost its nasalization. I believe _mh_ is still [w~] or [v~] or maybe [B~] in some Irish Gaelic dialects. I am fairly certain that I have come across them elsewhere - but I'll need to do some serious research.
> > Words in which the little monsters would occur include _mhedh_ [B~eD] > "the elf", > _nhagh_ [D~aG] "the dwarf"*, and _nhoch_ [G~ox] "the day". By parallel to > the > development of oral stops, one'd also expect them to occur medially in > some > words,
This ooe would :)
> but I think I'll stomp that out with a bit of merging and leveling.
Aw!! Keep 'em. Ray =============================================== http://home.freeuk.com/ray.brown ray.brown@freeuk.com =============================================== Anything is possible in the fabulous Celtic twilight, which is not so much a twilight of the gods as of the reason." [JRRT, "English and Welsh" ]

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Chris Bates <chris.maths_student@...>