Madurese aspirates

[Waruno Mahdi]

> Pursuing an inquiry from the Indo-European list, can anybody give me
> a brief but authoritative statement as to the historical origin of
> the voiced aspirated stops in Madurese, or point me to somewhere this
> has been discussed? Thanks.

Ross, Madurese has:

                     b < *w    bh < *b
                     D < *D    dh < *d
                               gh < *g

where Mad. D is retroflex "d", *D was probably not a stop in immediate
pre-Madurese. The general picture is that pre-Madurese voiced stops
became aspirated voiced stops, whereas Madurese unaspirated voiced
stops originate either from voiced continuents or from relatively late
borrowing. See:

   Nothofer, Bernd, 1975, the Reconstruction of Proto-Malayo-Javanic,
      Verhandelingen van het Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en
      Volkenkunde 73. 's-Gravenhage: Nijhoff.

   Stevens, Alan M., 1966, The Madurese Reflexes of Proto-Malayo-Polynesian,
      Journal of the American Oriental Society 86:147-156

It is noteworthy that a tendency to shift voiced stops to aspirated,
and to develop new voiced stops from continuents can be seen as a
frequent feature of languages of mainland SE Asia, distributed
across boundaries of genetic affiliations. At a subsequent stage,
the aspirated voiced stops could lose voice to become aspirated
voiceless stops in some of the languages.

Regards,   Waruno

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