Awahawi / Amahami

[Rgraczyk at aol.com]

A few comments on b/m/w and d/n/l in Crow.  I prefer to treat the nasals as
the underlying segments, simply because it is simpler to state the
distribution if the nasals are view as 'basic'.  Of course this says nothing
about historical developments.

It is interesting that the distribution of these allophones is different in
the 19 C Jesuit materials.  I find many examples of m and n intervocalically;
currently only w and l occur in this environment.  I also find mb and nd
clusters; today these are mm and nn.

Also, I  occasionally hear a stop intervocalically in spoken Crow for
purposes of emphasis: e.g., instead of tawe'ek 'it's hot', I sometimes hear
'tabe'ek'.  As John pointed out, this is not too surprising, since the sounds
are conditioned variants.

Randy