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

Carlos Thompson <chlewey@...> wrote:
>
> 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].
>
This looks just like Quenya. I guess Spanish might be going
the same way. Even when I'm speaking English or one of my
conlangs I tend to fricativize medial voiced stops. If this
goes on, the voiced stops might disappear altogether, the
nasal+stop clusters becoming double/long nasals:
/tambor/ > /tammor/, /tengo/ > /teNNo/.


--Pablo Flores

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
 And the Lord said unto Job, "There's no
 reason for it.  It's just policy."
                                       Kelvin Throop