[Lingtyp] Pronominal nasality and the areality of iconicity

[Johanna NICHOLS]

I found evidence for the same kind of pattern in 'sun' and 'moon', and
maybe some other salient natural pairs:

Nichols, Johanna. 2001. Why “me” and “thee”? Laurel J. Brinton, ed.,
Historical Linguistics 1999, 253-276. Amsterdam-Philadelphia: Benjamins.

and not just in personal pronouns but also in interrogative pronouns:

Nichols, Johanna. 2012. The history of an attractor state: Adventitious m
in Nakh-Daghestanian. Tiina Hyytiäinen, Lotta Jalava, Janne Saarikivi and
Erika Sandman, ed., Per Urales ad Orientem: Iter Polyphonicum Multilingue
(Festschrift for Juha Janhunen), 261-278. Helsinki: SUST.


See also work by Matthias Urban, e.g.:

Urban, Matthias. 2009. ‘Sun’ and ‘moon’ in the Circum-Pacific language
area. Anthropological Linguistics 51:3-4: 328-346.
Urban, Matthias, 2012. Analyzability and semantic associations in referring
expressions: A study in comparative lexicology. Ph.D. dissertation, Leiden
University.


I woud be interested in seeing a copy of your thesis when it's finished
(unless it's in Korean, which I can't read).

Johanna Nichols


On Sun, Feb 11, 2018 at 8:42 AM, JOO Ian <il.y.en.a at outlook.com> wrote:

> Dear fellow members of the mailing list,
>
>
>
> Gordon (1995) and Nichols & Peterson (1996) confirm that nasals are
> frequent in 1st and 2nd person pronouns around the world, but different
> continent prefer different nasals for each pronoun: Eurasian languages
> prefer /m/ for the 1st pronoun, whereas the “Pacific Rim” prefers /m/ for
> the 2nd pronoun, and the initial /ŋ-/ is prevalent in Australian
> languages.
>
>
>
> Nichols and Peterson conjectured that this may be the cause of "areal
> relatedness due to diffusion of phonosymbolic canons”. That is, iconic
> patterns may be diffused throughout languages, not just independently
> emerge from each language. The example they add is the system of /mama/ and
> /papa/:
>
>
>
> In personal pronoun systems, *n* and *m* can be said to mark different
> dimensions of a minimal deictic space. They do so as well in 'mama-papa'
> systems (which are deictic but not shifters). Both the pronouns and the
> child-language kin terms use consonants phonosymbolically to structure
> deictic space; the phonosymbolic principles are macroareal (*mama* and
> *papa*, for instance, being distinctly western Eurasian forms); but the
> actual pronouns and kin terms themselves are not commonly borrowed. (p. 358)
>
> I wonder if you have any other examples of iconic patterns areally
> spreading throughout specific regions, other than pronominal nasality and
> kinship terms. I would greatly appreciate your help, as this is relevant
> for my thesis.
>
>
>
> From Daejeon, Korea,
>
> Ian Joo
>
> http://ianjoo.academia.edu
>
>
>
> References
>
> Gordon, Matthew J. "The phonological composition of personal pronouns:
> implications for genetic hypotheses." *Annual Meeting of the Berkeley
> Linguistics Society*. Vol. 21. No. 1. 1995.
>
>
>
> Nichols, Johanna, and David A. Peterson. "The Amerind personal pronouns."
> *Language* (1996): 336-371.
>
> _______________________________________________
> Lingtyp mailing list
> Lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
> http://listserv.linguistlist.org/mailman/listinfo/lingtyp
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lingtyp/attachments/20180211/f11af929/attachment.htm>