Query: Creation of nasal vowels by lenition of preceding nasal consonants

[Alexis Michaud]

Dear HistLingers,


I was wondering if someone knew of languages in which (phonemic) nasal 
vowels had developed from the influence of PRECEDING nasal consonants?

In languages of East and Southeast Asia, there are quite a few examples 
where the feature of nasality transphonologizes from a nasal consonant – 
usually a nasal which is part of a cluster: typically a fricative or 
stop plus /m, n, ŋ/ – to the following vowel (=to the syllable rhyme). 
Since Haudricourt discovered an instance of this phenomenon in Lakkia, 
the same observation was repeated in languages belonging to other East 
and Southeast Asian language families: Austroasiatic and Tibeto-Burman. 
The cases reported to date are: Lakkia, Mon, Yi, Tamang, Naxi, Na, 
Shixing, Pumi and Nu. More recently, Guillaume Jacques suggested to me 
that something similar had occurred in Indoeuropean, in Celtic: Breton 
kraoñ, Welsh cnau, Irish cnú for 'walnut'.

The idea is to bring together examples from different languages, with as 
much detail as possible, to understand the conditions under which this 
type of change takes place.

With many thanks,

Alexis Michaud

PS Here is a brief summary of the telltale example of the nasal vowels 
of Lakkia (Tai-Kadai family). Haudricourt 1967 hypothesized that these 
nasal vowels were derived, not from earlier nasal codas, but from 
earlier initial nasal consonants. Comparison across languages of the 
Tai-Kadai family shows that some Lakkia syllables with an initial velar 
stop stand in a regular relation of correspondence with nasal-initial 
syllables in Kam and in Southwestern Thai dialects (Solnit 1988:232-234 
; Edmondson and Yang Quan 1988 ; Ferlus 1996:239). In most cases, these 
Lakkia words have a nasal vowel. For instance, ‘dog’, reconstructed as 
/*kʰma/, has become /kʰwõ/ in Lakkia, i.e. the medial nasal /m/ is no 
longer present; it left as its traces a semi-vowel /w/, and the 
(phonemic) nasalization of the following vowel. (Tones not indicated here.)


-- 
Alexis Michaud
laboratoire Langues et Civilisations à Tradition Orale
http://lacito.vjf.cnrs.fr/
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