Re: Is this a realistic phonology?

At 3:48 pm -0600 7/3/99, Nik Taylor wrote:
>Daniel Andreasson wrote:
>> I'm sorry that I ask, and it's possible that there's something here that
>>I don't
>> quite get, but what's bizarre about having more nasals than voiced stops?
>> Swedish has six nasals (bilabial, labiodental, dental, retroflex,
>>palatal and velar)
>> and only four voiced stops (blb, dental, retroflex and velar).
>
>Well, only that, up to this point, I didn't realize that there *were*
>langs with more nasals than stops.
And are all the six Swedish nasals noted above six distinct _phonemes_?
For example, English has a labiodental nasal but not it doesn't have
phonemic status; it's merely an allophone of /m/ (or /n/ according to some
analyses) before /f/ or /v/.  English has only three nasal phonemes (some
Brit. English dialects still have only two), though other nasals occur as
allophones.

As post-vocalic nasals are more subject to modification by a following
consonant than post-vocalic plosives are, I suspect it's not at all
uncommon to find more nasal sounds than voiced plosives in very many
languages.  But I'm still with Nik when it comes to actual _phonemes_.

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At 7:27 pm -0500 7/3/99, Steg Belsky wrote:
>On Sun, 7 Mar 1999 16:25:02 -0600 Tom Wier <artabanos@...>
>writes:
>>At the risk of being presumptuous, I don't think Nik meant anything
>>bad
>>about that... just that it's strange to him (and indeed, probably to
>>any
>>English speaker, myself included).  No value judgments here :)
>>
>>(Besides, if you want to be really picky, nasals *are* voiced stops!
>>:) )
>>
>>=======================================================
>>Tom Wier <artabanos@...>
>
>But don't stops have to....well, stop?
To which Nik replied:
........
>It's a debate over terminology, in effect.  Traditionally, nasals were
>not considered stops, but nowadays some linguists reffer to them as
>"nasal stops", meaning that air is stopped in the mouth, but it's still
>nasal.  Traditional stops are then referred to as "oral stops".
>Personally, I prefer the traditional definitions.
Indeed, Tom was voicing a somewhat controversial view.  By no means all
phonologists regard nasals as stops.  Like Nik, I am a 'traditionalist' on
this issue as, indeed, is the redoubtable Mark Line who used to express his
points somewhat forcibly on this list at one time :)

Indeed, if you want to be really, really picky, *voiceless* nasals cannot
by any stretch of the imagination be voiced stops :)

Personally I think debating whether nasals are a subdivision of stops will
get us nowhere.

Ray.

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PS.
At 2:30 pm -0600 7/3/99, Nik Taylor wrote:
>Don't be afraid of being "too radical".  :-)  Some languages have
>bizarre diphthongs, I suspect that there are languages which can combine
>any vowels into diphthongs.  Old English, I think, had a lot of them.
Indeed - and Old French had even more as well has a good battery of
triphthongs  :)