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Re: Why Not More Nasals!!!!? (was: Is this a realistic phonology?)

From:Carlos Thompson <chlewey@...>
Date:Tuesday, March 9, 1999, 5:52
Nik Taylor wrote:

> Kristian Jensen wrote: > > So if the main > > opposition between stops in Tungusic languages is between voice and > > voiceless, then alas: there IS a language who does have more nasals > > than voiced oral stops, even if the main opposition between stops is > > between voiced and voiceless. > > It occurs to me that Spanish provides an example of something that > *could*, theoretically, evolve into that. It already has a nasal at a > POA where there is no stop (palatal, n~). Suppose that, like English, > <ng> evolved into a velar stop, so that <tengo> (I have) would become > /teNo/ (I think it's [tEN.go] in Spanish), then it would have 4 nasals > and 3 voiced stops.
Or we could supose that the voiced stop-frictive alophones of Spanish (/b/-/B/, /d/-/D/ and /g/-/G/) where lost in favour of the fricative variants, and the stops will only arise after a nasal (this morning I was listening to a friend of mine which used /D/ in sentence initial {d}). Then we would have the following phonemic sounds: lbl dnt pal vel voiceles stops /p/ /t/ /k/ voiced nasal stops /m/ /n/ /J/ /N/ voiced oral stops voiced fricatives /B/ /D/ /G/ where the only voiced oral stops would be /m/+/B/ -> [mb] and /n/+/D/ -> [nd]. -- Carlos Th