Re: Nasals from Non-nasals

----- Original Message -----

From: richardwordingham

To: phoNet@yahoogroups.com

Sent: Wednesday, July 10, 2002 9:02 PM

Subject: [phoNet] Re: Nasals from Non-nasals

> 3. Rhinoglottophilia, in which glottal or pharyngeal 'activity' becomes associated with nasality.  This can yield nasalised consonants, or even plain nasal consonants.

 

If I recall correctly, Arabic pharyngeals also tend to make adjacent vowels nasalised; another nice example is the nasalisation of *a > a{ng} before glottal h < *s in Avestan.

> Of these classes, only rhinoglottophilia could create nasals in a language without nasals.

 

Some languages use nasality as a prosody rather than a segmental feature. Desano (spoken in Amazonia) has been described (Kaye 1971 [Linguistic Inquiry 2: 37-56]) as a language in which whole _morphemes_ are [+/- nasal]. Each voiced segment (vowel or consonant) has a nasal counterpart (e.g. v -- v~, d/r -- n, i -- i~), while /p, t, s, k, h/ are completely transparent to nasal harmony. One could imagine a historical trajectory like this: no nasals > suprasegmental nasality > phonologised nasal segments. I don't know if this is known to have ever happened, but it's at least a possibility.

 

Piotr