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

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