Funny W. More cold water.

[Rankin, Robert L]

Guys,
 
I'd like to bring up the extreme distributional skewing of */mb/, */nd/ if you consider them distinct phonological segments.  
 
I explain the skewing as the interaction of prefixes with root/stem initials, i.e., morphological and phonological clusters.
 
If we ignore the morphology and go with the unit phonemes (which I admit we're sort of doing using the symbols W and R), how do we explain why these units only occur in very narrowly defined contexts?  Don't we already have enough trouble with /glottal stop/?
 
Bob

________________________________

From: owner-siouan at lists.colorado.edu on behalf of Rory M Larson
Sent: Mon 11/27/2006 9:01 AM
To: siouan at lists.colorado.edu
Subject: RE: Funny W



John wrote:
> But the
> "voiced stop" in question may well have some prenasalization, and that's
> what I was referring to.  English orthography has no way to represent
> this, of course.   My main point was that my digraphs mb, nd, etc., are
> not intended to imply a fully syllabic nasal, just a prenasalized one.

That makes sense.  I think using mb, nd, etc. with the caveat that the prenasalization is short and non-syllabic is quite clear.  Of course, we'd still have the problem of these same sounds arising epenthetically in interior positions wherever a stop is preceded by a nasal vowel.

If English orthography is a problem, we could represent these stops more precisely as:

Nasal:      N
Oral:       PPPP*aaaaa
Laryngeal:  V   VVVVVV

for /mba/, and

Nasal:      N
Oral:       TTTT*aaaaa
Laryngeal:  V   VVVVVV

for /nda/.

(Nasal track: N - nasalization;
 Oral track: P - full labial closure; T - full alveolar closure; * - release click; a - the vowel;
 Laryngeal track: V - voicing.)

These would be in contrast to my idea of nasally released stops:

Nasal:         *NN
Oral:       PPPPPaaaaa
Laryngeal:        VVVV

for /pm^a/, and

Nasal:         *NN
Oral:       TTTTTaaaaa
Laryngeal:        VVVV

for /tn^a/.

Rory