[Lingtyp] L > N

[Luca Ciucci]

Dear Sergey,
In Chamacoco (Zamucoan; Paraguay), d- and l- alternate and may turn into n- in word-initial position. This affects the third-person irrealis in verbs and the reflexive third-person possessor in nouns. The change of d-/l- into n- is related to nasal harmony, but initial d-, l- and n- are in free alternation and their occurrence within a single inflected form in unpredictable. I provide further information on this in the following publications:
Ciucci, L. 2016. Inflectional morphology in the Zamucoan languages. Asunción: CEADUC. Available at: https://hal.science/hal-04429404v1 (see Sections 5.2.1 and 10.3).
Ciucci, L. 2020. Wordhood in Chamacoco. In A. Y. Aikhenvald, R. M. W. Dixon & N. M. White (eds.), Phonological word and grammatical word, 78-120. Oxford University Press. Available at https://hal.science/hal-04428508v1 (see in particular Section 3.2).

All the best

Luca


Luca Ciucci
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Chair for Multilingual Computational Linguistics, University of Passau
Adjunct Research Fellow, James Cook University
https://cv.hal.science/luca-ciucci

________________________________
From: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> on behalf of Larry M Hyman via Lingtyp <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
Sent: 22 September 2025 04:52
To: Sergey Loesov <sergeloesov at gmail.com>
Cc: LINGTYP at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
Subject: Re: [Lingtyp] L > N


This message was sent from someone external to JCU. Please do not click links or open attachments unless you recognise the source of this email and know the content is safe.

Thanks for all of the examples showing l > n. Although the contexts vary, I assume this change is a case of "strengthening", which would naturally associate it with onset position (although also with stem- and word-initial positions). From my experience, prefixes are more likely to undergo l > n. In some Grassfields Bantu and Northwest Bantu languages the noun class 5 prefix *li- is realized ni- (~ nə-), e.g. Yemba (Bamileke-Dschang) lə-, Mbui ni-. I suspect that the greater resistance of *l to [n] at the beginning of lexical morphemes (e.g. noun and verb roots) is because of the more significant contrastiveness of /l/ and /n/ vs. the small number of grammatical morphemes.

There also is the reverse occurrence of n > l in a "weakening" environment. Thus, in Aghem (Grassfields Bantu), /n/ becomes [l] intervocalically within stems. This not only produces alternations like bɨ́n 'dance' vs. bɨ́l-a 'dance-progressive' (Proto-Bantu *bín) but also relics of the Proto-Bantu suffix *an 'reciprocal' as -lɔ. The following is from pp.9-10 of Aghem Grammatical Structure (1979), which I see is available here: https://gsil.sc-ling.org/pubs/SCOPILS_6_7_8_9/Aghem_grammatical_structure.pdf

Best,  Larry

[image.png]

On Sat, Sep 20, 2025 at 5:39 AM Sergey Loesov via Lingtyp <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org<mailto:lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>> wrote:

Dear colleagues,

 Are you aware of a shift l- > n- affecting the onsets of grammatical morphemes, specifically in word-initial position?



Thank you very much!



Sergey



_______________________________________________
Lingtyp mailing list
Lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org<mailto:Lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
https://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/lingtyp


--
Larry M. Hyman, Distinguished Professor of the Graduate School
& Director, France-Berkeley Fund, University of California, Berkeley
https://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~hyman
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lingtyp/attachments/20250921/9c466233/attachment-0001.htm>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: image.png
Type: image/png
Size: 2159799 bytes
Desc: image.png
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lingtyp/attachments/20250921/9c466233/attachment-0001.png>