Re: Phonological questions, bunch 2

Andreas Johansson wrote:
> Quoting R A Brown <ray@...>:
> op
> > > even if I have never heard of nasal vowels developing from something
> > > else than oral vowel + nasal stop.
> >
> > Nor have I.
>
> ISTR recall hearing of an Indonesian language in which a nasal stop caused
> all
> _following_ nasalizable sounds to be nasalized.
>
I recall a study of Madurese (written in the 60s or early 70s) where
something like that was detailed-- it involved a _nasal_ /m n N (ñ?)/
causing nasalization of subsequent vowels, up until a stop intervened. I
don't recall whether nasal+stop clusters also caused it.  I've also seen
somewhere, a similar study on Bahasa Indonesia (possibly in the Rutgers
Optimality archive).

While awareness of such a phenomenon might enable a learner to acquire a
more "native" accent, my feeling is that such nasalization probably happens
in lots of languages.  Midwestern US speakers are often caricatured as
"talking through their noses"........

Anecdotal, not quite the same but interesting: my usual brand of cigarettes
in Indonesia was "Komodor" [komo'dor](i.e. Engl. Commodore)-- often heard as
[komon'dor] in casual speech (at least in Java).

At least 1 language (Ngaju Dayak of Borneo) has a regular sound change:
medial y > ñ if the preceding syllable began with a nasal (*mayaN > mañang).
However, *y (= [j]) is quite rare in the AN proto-vocabulary.

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