Re: Question about word-initial velar nasal

On Thursday, November 4, 2004, at 03:27 , Tim May wrote:

> (Sorry, this first went direct to Philip - GMail Reply-To header)
>
> Philip Newton wrote at 2004-11-04 07:00:02 (+0100)
>> On Thu, 4 Nov 2004 02:31:38 +0000, Tim May <butsuri@...> wrote:
>>> Danny Wier wrote at 2004-10-24 06:38:00 (-0500)
>>>> From: "Tim May"
>>>>
>>>>> Incidentally, what languages _do_ allow /N/ initally?
>>>>> Offhand, I can only think of Vietnamese and Tibetan, and
>>>>> it's a tricky thing to look up.
>>>>
>>>> Albanian, and I have no idea how that happened.
[snip]

>> At any rate, http://www.google.com/search?q=nga+site%3Aal finds a
>> number of hits for the word "nga" in Albanian sites.
>>
>
> That's very interesting.  It certainly appears that "nga" is an
> Albanian word - it seems to be a preposition meaning "from" "of" or
> "by".
Maybe - but that does not necessarily mean Albanian has initial [N].

> On the other hand, the UPSID profile for Albanian doesn't list a velar
> nasal
> http://www.langmaker.com/db/ups_albanian.htm
> and none of the pronunciation guides I can find describe either a
> velar nasal phoneme or an "ng" digraph.
Same here.

> Which leaves me wondering how "nga" is pronounced.
Albanian seems to have prenasalized voiced plosives, for example:
mbrapa - behind
mbrëmja - evening
mbarue - to finish
mbushë - full
mbrenda - inside
mbrami - last
mbas - next
mbi - on
mbyllë - to shut

ndyer - dirty
ndigjue - to hear
ndihmue - to help
ndreqë - to repair
ndejë - to stay

So I guess that in the following we similarly have prenasalized voiced
plosives:
ngranë - to dine
ngushtë - narrow
ngadalë - slowly
ngrohtë - warm

However, I am also told that it is only the southern Tosk dialect that
retains the prenasalized plosive in the combos _mb_ and _nd_; in the
northern Gheg dialect they are simply nasals, i.e. juy plain ol' [m] and
[n] respectively. My source is infuriately silent about initial ng- but
this does suggest surely that while initial ng- is /ng/ [Ng] in Tosk, it
is /N/ [N] in Gheg.

So my partially informed guess is that -nga_ is /nga/ [Nga] in Tosk but
/Na/ in Gheg. Do we have any Albanian experts on board?

>
>> (Strangely enough, it also finds a number of sentences containing
>> e-dot, which I had only known from Lithuanian -- I only know
>> e-umlaut for Albanian.
Same here.

>> Maybe a dialect compromise meaning "some
>> dialects pronounce this /ë/, others /e/"?
I was not aware of this variation. Does e-single-dot occur in the same
texts as e-double-dot? If not, I would assume that e-single-dot was an
alternative spelling of e-double-dot.

But we need someone more knowledgeable about Albanian


Ray
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