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