--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Patrick Ryan" <proto-language@...>
wrote:
> So I ask you: what criteria should we use to judge whether the
[nd] is phonemic (/Nd/) or simply compositional (/n/+/d/)?
The simplest form of evidence is a contrast between the cluster and
the alleged prenasalised stop. They're actually spelt differently in
Sinhalese (an IE language), e.g. <aNDa> 'sound' and <aN:Da> 'egg'
where ':' is the grapheme disjunctor if I have the transliteration
right. There's a similar contrast in both speech and spelling in, I
think, Telugu (Dravidian), but I may be confusing it with another
non-Tamil Dravidian language.
Of course, that approach doesn't work with CV languages like Vai,
which has prenasalised labiovelars, velars, palatals (or are they
affricatives?), dental implosive and labial implosive. It has
ingessive voiced dental and labial stops, but not prenasalised.
Richard.