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Re: THEORY: Denasalization

From:John Vertical <johnvertical@...>
Date:Tuesday, December 5, 2006, 20:12
>The WP article <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denasal> says >that > >| However, there are cases of historical or allophonic >| denasalization which have produced oral stops. In some >| languages with nasal vowels, such as Paici~, nasal stops >| may occur only before nasal vowels; while before oral >| vowels, prenasalized stops are found. This allophonic >| variation is likely to be due to a historical process of >| partial denasalization. Similarly, several languages >| around Puget Sound underwent a process of denasalization >| about one century ago: Except in special speech registers, >| such as baby talk, the nasal stops [m, n] became the >| voiced oral stops [b, d]. It appears from historical >| records that there was an intermediate stage when these >| stops were prenasalized [mb, nd]. > >I wonder would there *really* not be any ANADEWity for nasal >consonants becoming oral (voiced) stops or vice versa >depending on the nasality of adjacent vowels? Has anyone >heard of anything along those lines apart from the above? > > >/BP 8| )>
I am not sure what exactly it is you're after here - you quote an example of loss of nasality in vicinity of oral vowels, and proceed to ask if it's true that there are no examples? Are you douting the quote on some basis, maybe reading somewhere else that this sort of a change does not occur? Or is there just a typo somewhere in there? Anyway, proto-Niger-Congo is apparently also constructed as having a similar situation - after the model of various existing N-C langs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niger-Congo_languages#Nasality John Vertical _________________________________________________________________ Uutiset ja kasvot uutisten takaa. MSN Search, täyden palvelun hakukone. http://search.msn.fi