nasality and negation

[claude-hagege]

Dear all,

    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 ops-ta "not to exist", but also ani-ta "not to be"; Standard Indonesian has tidak "no" but bukan "is not", and Jakarta spoken Indonesian has nggak "no"; Georgian has ar "no", but also prohibitive nu, and as for the negative potential ver "cannot", it begins with a voiced labiodental which has some features in common with a nasal. 
    But 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 huwag, Malagasy has tsi, Palauan has diak (and for that matter, negations containing nasals are rare overall in Austronesian languages); Israeli Hebrew has lo; 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. 
    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.

All best,
Claude Hagège, Collège de France, Paris.
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