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Re: THEORY: Denasalization

From:Patrick Littell <puchitao@...>
Date:Monday, December 4, 2006, 22:48
> 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) >