Re: Natlang Help: Do you know of a language that...

David Peterson wrote:

 DP I have an idea for a possible paper topic for school, but I need to look at
languages other than English. What I'm looking for are languages that:

  (1) Allow coda voiced velar consonants (e.g., [g] and [N]), and
 (2) Make a distinction between tense and lax non-low vowels (so, /e/ vs. /E/,
/i/ vs. /I/, /u/ vs. /U/, /o/ vs. /O/).

  Do you know of any natlangs that do this?

 The ones I thought of either devoice final voiced consonants, or don't have a
tense/lax distinction (though German does allow final velar nasals. Hmm...).
 RM It's _possible_ that some dialects of Yiddish don't devoice finals (I seem
to recall reading that somewhere). You've probably thought of Philippine langs.
like Tagalog, but they don't have tense/lax phonemic vowels. It's possible some
of the stranger Melanesian/Micronesian langs. have voiced finals (due to final
vowel loss), and some of them, like Trukese, have quite large vowel systems--
but I'm not sure that tense/lax would enter into it.

  (snip discussion of examples)
 It seems to me that /u/:/U/ have very limited distribution before _all_ final
nasals; the absence of /-uN~ -UN/ seems to be a definite structural
constraint-- and possibly /-ug ~ -Ug/ as well. There may be historical reasons
for that; I'm not sure. Bear in mind that one reason for the odd vowel
distribution before /-N/, is that historically it was /-Ng(+V)/, so that only
short V would have occurred before the 2-cons.cluster.

 DP My theory is that voiced velar codas nullify the tense/lax distinction
because they raise the F2 and lower the F3, effectively lowering high vowels,
and raising lower vowels (though this doesn't seem to be pertinent for low
vowels).

  RM You could be onto something there.

 A possibility for you might be, to examine the Germanic languages in genl.
w.r.t. what happened to vowels before (originally) voiced velar finals, bearing
in mind that most (all?) of them resulted from loss of final vowels/endings.

Reply