Re: Nasalless Languages
| From: | Philip Newton <philip.newton@...> |
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| Date: | Sunday, July 11, 2004, 5:05 |
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On Sun, 11 Jul 2004 00:33:17 -0400, Roger Mills <rfmilly@...> wrote:
> Emily wrote:
>
> > Two have prenasalized stops [but no nasals]
> > 8. HAKKA [ HAK ] : 33.000.000 in half the world (PRC, Brunei, French
> > Guiana, French Polynesia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Panama, Singapore,
> > Suriname, ROC, Thailand... etc.); Sino-Tibetan, Chinese
>
> Any idea or info on how that happened? AFAIK other Chinese languages have /m
> n N/ for sure initially, sometimes as coda. Presumably Sino-Tibetan had */m
> n N/ too????
I was also surprised to read that Hakka has no nasals.
http://www.sungwh.freeserve.co.uk/sapienti/haksound.htm shows that at
least one dialect of Hakka does have nasals - it has initial /m/ and
/N/ as well as final /m/ /n/ /N/ (initial /n/ has merged with /l/ in
that dialect, which possibly implies that it exists in other varieties
of Hakka).
Cheers,
--
Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>