Re: Sound changes

At 8:50 AM -0400 8/23/02, John Cowan wrote:
>Mandarin changed ancestral /N/ in initial position to /w/, which is
>really weird; if any two voiced sounds have less in common, I can't
>think of them.  (E.g. the Cantonese name Ng has the Mandarin equivalent
>Wu.)
Actually, that strikes me as okay. Southern Paiute shows lenition of
/m/ to [N_w] intervocalically; this is simplified to [N] in some
dialects and to [w] in others. (Shoshoni shows lenition of /m/ to
[w~] in the same environment.) Both [N] and [w] have a raised tongue
dorsum; for [N], the tongue dorsum touches the soft palate, while for
[w] it approximates it. So if /N/ is going to become a glide, /w/
seems to me to be the likely choice.

Dirk
--
Dirk Elzinga                  Dirk_Elzinga@byu.edu

Man deth swa he byth thonne he mot swa he wile.
'A man does as he is when he can do what he wants.'

- Old English Proverb