Re: Nasalized fricatives ...

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, 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/).
Way to go! And I still think you should have an /s/ > /h/ mutation!

>
> 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]).
Icelandic has allophonic nasalized [z~] before /s/, as in _sólin skínur_
[,so:wlez~'skin2r].  I have never seen it mentioned if [v~] occurs
before /f/ and /v/ or similar occasions like [D~T] accross a word
boundary.  This is nothing you notice if you don't pay attention,
neither is it neccessary to emulate it to make yourself understood.

>
> 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, but I think I'll stomp that out with a bit of merging and leveling.
Why?

--

/BP 8^)>
--
Benct Philip Jonsson -- melroch at melroch dot se

         Solitudinem faciunt pacem appellant!
                                             (Tacitus)

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