THEORY: Denasalization

Unocode alert -- I'm too tired to do anything about it...
You can always follow the link if you can't see the Unicode.

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 Paicĩ, 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| )>
--
Benct Philip Jonsson -- melroch at melroch dot se

    a shprakh iz a dialekt mit an armey un flot

                                 (Max Weinreich)

--


/BP 8^)>
--
Benct Philip Jonsson -- melroch at melroch dot se

    a shprakh iz a dialekt mit an armey un flot

                                 (Max Weinreich)

Reply