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<DIV><FONT face=Arial>Dear James and Matthew,</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2><FONT face=Arial> </FONT><FONT face=Arial
size=3>James Gair writes that he does not recall that Dravidian has been
mentioned. Dravidian is explicitly mentioned in my 30 August message, reproduced
below. Besides, I agree with Matthew Dryer that "<FONT
face="Times New Roman"><FONT face=Arial>we need to be careful in a number of
ways" and that</FONT> </FONT> "what we need to do is to avoid examining too
many languages from the same family". This is precisely why the message below
cites languages from widely different phyla and recalls that one among many
necessary methodological precautions consists of examining the different types
of negations languages may exhibit, rather than looking for negation in general.
Finally, I'm not sure it is true that nasal morphemes crosslinguistically tend
to be shorter than others.This is not always true, for example, in
languages that use verbs to express negation, nor is it true on the level of
whole language families (with the proviso above, of course!): Austronesian
languages like Indonesian, Tagalog, Malagasy, various Oceanian languages, etc.,
have a strong tendency towards dissyllabic words, whether nasal or other.
Various African languages express main clause negation by reduplication, and
even, in the case of Banda-Linda ((Adamawa-Eastern), reduplication + tonal
phenomena.</FONT></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial>All best, Claude</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face="UT Ethiopic Serif">
<DIV><FONT face=Arial>Dear all,</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2> <FONT size=3>It is somewhat
surprising to see that a logical, or cognitively motivated, link is
proposed between nasality and negation, just because many languages express
one by means of the other. It is true that the number of such
languages that have been mentioned so far in this discussion is impressing.
It is also true that since many languages have more than one way of expressing
negation (depending on mood, aspect, subordination, nominal or verbal sentence,
etc.), one must be cautious before affirming hastily that a language does not
use a nasal in negative forms: Corean has <EM>ops-ta</EM> "not to exist", but
also <EM>ani-ta</EM> "not to be"; Standard Indonesian has <EM>tidak</EM> "no"
but <EM>bukan</EM> "is not", and Jakarta spoken Indonesian has <EM>nggak</EM>
"no"; Georgian has <EM>ar</EM> "no", but also prohibitive <EM>nu</EM>, and as
for the negative potential <EM>ver</EM> "cannot", it begins with a
voiced labiodental which has some features in common with a nasal.
</FONT></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2> <FONT size=3> But</FONT> <FONT
size=3>although it is true that theoretical attempts to interpret the link
between nasals and negations may have a local application scope,
and that, to that extent, one cannot deny that they may shed some light on
the nature of negation, such attempts remain shaky. The main reason for this is
not far to seek: the number of languages that give the lie to
these attempts is no less impressive that the number of those that support them.
To mention only a few: Tagalog has <EM>huwag</EM>, Malagasy has
<EM>tsi</EM>, Palauan has <EM>diak</EM> (and for that matter, negations
containing nasals are rare overall in Austronesian languages); Israeli Hebrew
has <EM>lo; </EM>neither Hausa nor Fulani have negations containing nasals
(but is true that Wolof, though West-Atlantic like Fulani, has nasals in some of
the negative pronouns of its verbal paradigms); in many of the languages where
the main clause negation is in fact a verb "to not", there is no support for the
hypothesis of a nasality~negation relationship: such languages are, for
example, Finnish (and Estonian), Comox and other Salishan languages.
</FONT></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2> <FONT size=3> I am just
mentioning here languages that occur to my mind now, and I have no time to
pursue the inquiry further, although I suspect that Eskimo-Aleut,
Chukotko-Kamchatkan, Na-Dene, Penutian, Dravidian, many Caucasian languages
deserve to be examined in that respect. A large-scale inquiry would no
doubt bring a lot of other counter-examples to the (interesting) hypothesis of a
nasality~negation link, essentialy based on Indo-European languages and others
from some other groups.</FONT></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial>All best,</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial>Claude Hagège, Collège de France,
Paris.</FONT></DIV></FONT></DIV></BODY></HTML>