Re: Nasalized fricatives ...

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
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