Re: THEORY: Denasalization

> 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?
>
It is, if I remember correctly, a hallmark of the Jê family of South
America that nasality is only contrastive for stops word-initially and
word-finally; otherwise, it's due to having a nasal vowel in the
immediate environment.  Or something similar.

You may also want to check out the Yanomaman languages, also South
American, which I believe has a nasal harmony constraint by which a
morpheme must be either nasal or non-nasal, with effects on the
consonants as well, but I don't remember the details.

Both are things that have struck me as, hey, I bet the CONLANG crowd
would get a kick out of these.

>
> /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)
>