[Lingtyp] Homoorganic vs. heteroorganic assymetry in nasal-plosive onset clusters

Tue Aug 12 05:58:23 UTC 2025

Dear Ian,

I’ve waited a week to see if others might answer in more explanatory
phonetic terms, but since you got me thinking, I thought I’d offer a few
comments about the nasal-stop asymmetries you noted.

Since you only presented labials and dental-alveolars, here is a more
complete table of what we need to consider (in fact, more).

“Better” Onsets

“Worse” Onsets

pm

pn

pŋ

mp

np

ŋp

tm

tn

tŋ

mt

nt

ŋt

km

kn

kŋ

mk

nk

ŋk

While your numbers aren’t large and some of the differences are not so
great (e.g. 11 mt- vs. 15 tm-), I think you are right that heterorganic CN
is a much more common onset than NC. I would relate this to the Sonority
Sequencing Constraint whereby a better CC onset would be one where the
first C is less sonorous (e.g. a stop), than the second C (e.g. a
sonorant). Thus, pl- is a good onset, while lp- is less so (and much
rarer). The mirror image generally holds for codas: -lp is better than -pl.
As Gussenhoven and Jacobs (2005: 138) put it: “syllables prefer to start
with a bang and end with a whimper”.

While the generalization covers more than nasal+stop or stop+nasal, nasals
do present a special situation. The African languages I work on generally
do not have complex onsets, but there are many which have either
prenasalized consonants, syllabic nasal + consonant, or both. Nasally
released CN is less attested, although importantly in Gwari [gbr], a
Benue-Congo language of Nigeria (see below). Whether to analyze homorganic
NC  and CN as one vs. two segments is a question that commonly arises.
Heterorganic NC and CN are (always?) two segments.

Coming back to the asymmetry you point out, I think it also could be useful
to look at the origin of the complex clusters. I assume that consonant
clusters mostly come from syncope, e.g. the yer phenomena in Slavic and
vowel weakening in the minor syllable of sesquisyllabic languages in
Southeast Asia. In Hyman (1972)*,*  I showed, ignoring vowel nasalization,
the following sequence of changes: *CVNV > CNV > CV᷉. Gwari shows the
second step with nasal release. (In doing my fieldwork back in 1970, the
[a] of Cŋa was perceptually oral to me. Although it may be slightly
nasalized, it certainly does not sound like closely related Nupe [nup],
which has fully nasalized vowels instead of nasally related consonants,
e.g. gã̀ ‘speak’.)

Gwari

cf. Proto-Grassfields Bantu

ò-kŋǎ

‘monkey’

*káná

kŋā

‘to fry’

*káŋ-i

gŋà

‘to speak’

*ɣàm

So the question is whether syncope would be equally likely to produce such
onsets as tm- and mt- from *tVmV and *mVtV, respectively? Siva has already
pointed out that *m would tend to undergo homorganic nasal assimilation,
i.e. mtV > ntV. Another possibility is that the nasal would become
syllabic, as is often the case in African languages.

Again there is a parallel with /l/. In a number of West African languages
earlier CVlV alternates with ClV, which ultimately wins out (see Sande 2024
for a recent statement about this phenomenon in Kru languages). Idoma [idu],
a Benue-Congo language of Nigeria, actually has Cl̩V, where the /l/ (-->
[r] after coronals) is syllabic and tone-bearing (Abraham 1951/1967: 108,
Hyman 1985: 49), e.g. pĺ̩-à ‘deceived’, ú-dŕ̩-ō ‘navel’. Interestingly,
syllabic /l/ doesn’t appear after nasals. Instead, the nasal is syllabic
and the liquid a lone (non-syllabic) onset consonant: m̩̀lɛ̀ ‘swallowed’.
Preconsonantal syllabic nasals are “better” than post-consonantal liquids!

I assume that your asymmetry holds of onsets in general, not just in
word-initial position, where longer (and more unusual) consonant sequences
would be more likely. However, it does not hold for heterosyllabic
consonant clusters. Instead we find the reverse asymmetry when consonants
meet across syllables (cf. Vennemann 1988):

“Worse” Contacts

“Better” Contacts

p.m

p.n

p.ŋ

m.p

n.p

ŋ.p

t.m

t.n

t.ŋ

m.t

n.t

ŋ.t

k.m

k.n

k.ŋ

m.k

n.k

ŋ.k

This again has to do with sonority: with CVN.CV we get Gussenhoven &
Jacob’s coda whimper followed by an onset bang.

Thanks for getting me thinking about this.

Cited works:

Abraham, R.C. 1951/1967. *The Idoma language*. London: University of London
Press.

Gussenhoven, Carlos & Haike Jacobs. 2005. Understanding phonology. 2nd
Edition. London: Hodder Arnold. (I haven’t checked more recent editions).

Hyman, Larry M. 1972. Nasals and nasalization in Kwa. *Studies in African
Linguistics* 3.167-206.

Hyman, Larry M. 1985. *A theory of phonological weight*. Dordrecht: Foris.
(Reprinted with a new introduction with William R. Leben. Stanford, CSLI,
2003.)

Sande, Hannah. 2024. Insertion or deletion? CVCV/CCV alternations in Kru
languages. In Ji Yea Kim, Veronica Miatto, Andrija Petrović & Lori Repetti
(eds.), *Epenthesis and beyond: Recent approaches to insertion in phonology
and its interfaces*, 21–55. Berlin: Language Science Pres

Vennemann, Theo. 1988. *Preference laws for syllable structure and the
explanation of sound change: With special reference to German, Germanic,
Italian, and Latin*. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

On Tue, Aug 5, 2025 at 2:48 AM JOO Ian via Lingtyp <
lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org> wrote:

> Dear typologists,
>
>
>
> It has occurred to me that homoorganic nasal-plosive onset clusters (e.g.
> /mp-/) seem to be more common than homoorganic plosive-nasal onset clusters
> (e.g. /pm-/), whereas heteroorganic plosive-nasal clusters (e.g. /pn-/) are
> more common than heteroorganic nasal-plosive clusters (e.g. /np/-).
>
> For example, based on Phonotacticon 1.0
> <https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/lingty-2023-0094>,
> which is limited to Eurasia, the following number of lects have the
> following onset clusters:
>
>
>
> l  /pm-/ : 2
>
> l  /mp-/ : 12
>
> l  /pn-/ : 14
>
> l  /np-/ : 4
>
>
>
> When looking at, say, /tn- nt- tm- mt-/, the pattern is the sameː
>
>
>
> l  /tn-/ ː 8
>
> l  /nt-/ ː 13
>
> l  /tm- / ː 15
>
> l  /mt-/ ː 11
>
>
>
>
>
> What could explain this assymetry?
>
>
>
> From Otaru,
>
> Ian
>
>
>
> - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
> 朱 易安
> JOO, IAN
> 准教授
> Associate Professor
> 小樽商科大学
> Otaru University of Commerce
>
>
>
> 🌐 ianjoo.github.io
> - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Lingtyp mailing list
> Lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
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>

-- 
Larry M. Hyman, Distinguished Professor of the Graduate School
& Director, France-Berkeley Fund, University of California, Berkeley
https://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~hyman
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