query: alveolar/dental asymmetries in phoneme inventories

[David Mead]

Hi David,

I have in my notes:
“A number of Western Malayo-Polynesian languages 
and perhaps some others contrast a dental /t/ 
with an alveolar /d/ and /n/.  The antiquity of 
this phonetic difference is unknown, but a 
similar distinction is found in a number of the 
non-Austronesian languages of mainland Southeast Asia.” (Blust 1990:233)
Muna  (WMP, Celebic)  /t/ is apico-dental and /d/ 
is apico-alveolar   (Van den Berg 2001:26)
Tolaki (WMP, Celebic)  /t/ is dental and /d/ is alveolar   (Youngman 2001:1)
David M.

======================

Berg, René van den. 1989. A grammar of the Muna 
language. Providence, RI: Foris.

Blust, Robert. 1990. Patterns of sound change in 
the Austronesian languages. In Linguistic change 
and reconstruction methodology (Trends in 
Linguistics: Studies and Monographs 45.), edited 
by Philip Baldi,  231–267. New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Youngman, Scott.. 2001. Addenda to Tolaki 
phonology. Unpublished typescript, 66 pp.



At 4/8/2009 07:01 PM +0200, David Gil wrote:
>Dear all,
>
>In Malay and Indonesian, the apical stops exhibit a curious
>place-of-articulation asymmetry: whereas [d] is alveolar, [t] is dental
>or (for some speakers, typically women) interdental.  In recent
>field-work, I seem to have encountered a similar asymmetry in two other
>quite distant Austronesian languages, Mentawai and Roon (though I'm not
>yet entirely sure of the facts here.)
>
>My two questions:
>
>(a) how common is this asymmetry (or for that matter the mirror-image
>one) in Austronesian, or for that matter any other languages?
>
>(b) specifically for Austronesian languages, I would also appreciate
>substantiated reports of languages that do *not* exhibit this asymmetry
>(ie. languages where both [d] and [t] are alveolar, or both [d] and [t]
>are dental, or both [d] and [t] can be either alveolar or dental, or
>there is no contrast between [d] or [t], or whatever.  My interest in
>this latter question is that I would like to try and map the
>geographical distribution of this asymmetry in the insular Southeast
>Asian region.
>
>Thanks,
>
>David
>
>--
>David Gil
>
>Department of Linguistics
>Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
>Deutscher Platz 6, D-04103 Leipzig, Germany
>
>Telephone: 49-341-3550321 Fax: 49-341-3550119
>Email: gil at eva.mpg.de
>Webpage:  http://www.eva.mpg.de/~gil/
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>An-lang mailing list
>An-lang at anu.edu.au
>http://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/an-lang
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/an-lang/attachments/20090408/7f764694/attachment.htm>
-------------- next part --------------
_______________________________________________
An-lang mailing list
An-lang at anu.edu.au
http://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/an-lang