Re: Why Not More Nasals!!!!?

On Tue, 9 Mar 1999, Brian Betty wrote:

> But Vietnamese has implosive consonants (like the famous Vietnamese b), for
> example, and voiced sounds and other local preferences are present in many
> languages in the region. I suspect that Beijing Mandarin, isolated in a sea
> of Altaic and other languages that prize distinctions of voicing, is
> tending towards voicing sounds ... weird. I wonder if the loss of finals is
> conditioned by neighboring languages which don't permit finals save nasals,
> much like Japanese (not that I think Japanese influenced Mandarin much ...
> ) I think Manchu is like this. Does anyone know?
Yes, Manchu is like this, at least word-finally (the only allowable
word-final consonant in native(/-ized) words being /n/).  Korean is not,
however, nor is Mongolian, other Tungusic languages, or any variety of the
Turkic languages that have been spoken around there that I know of.  I
think this may be 'coincidence'.

However, there are interesting arguments made about the morphological and
syntactic influence of Altaic languages on northern Chinese vernaculars. A
Japanese linguist whose name I'm blocked on right now has written a bit
about this.  Hashimoto?  I forget.  Not a terribly popular idea, as you
might imagine.  I'm not sure I quite buy it myself, and I'm no great
devotee of Chinese linguo-cultural purity.  Again, it could be
coincidence.

Kenji