Re: Why Not More Nasals!!!!?

At 12:25 PM 3/9/99 -0500, you wrote: "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'."

Maybe; although I am no great fan of conspiracy theories outside of
fiction, where they rock, it seems to me that the coincidental loss of
non-nasal stops and the arrival of the Manchu under the Qing is
interesting. I am a student of both Chinese and Korean (and I've done my
share of Japanese, mostly in Japan), and it *still* feels odd to me when
the Korean word preserves the original MC stop and the Mandarin has lost it
- and that's a pretty common occurrence, too!

"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."

Or, as sometimes happens, a nut writes about something and there is a grain
of truth to what he says - always an awkward situation. The whole
Korean-Japanese link mess, for example, needs a firm, even hand to
investigate it, and since few Western linguists seem to give a rat's arse
about Asian languages if they're not spoken by some dying tribe, most work
has been done by nuts or by Japanese or Korean scholars, and subsequently
dismissed by equal-and-opposite scholars of the other nation (by that
sentence, I've ruled out North Korean researchers, but I think that is safe
to do for now ...  ;-)      )

BB
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