Oral ~ Nasal Correspondences

[Koontz John E]

Incidentally, think further about Richard Dieterle's acorn : bear
comparison, one of the interesting things about the Siouan languages is
that (as far as I can recall) they don't make any productive use of
nasalization as a morpheme.

Apart from this, some sets are nasal, some are oral, in those languages
that have nasality as a vowel feature.  Crow and Hidatsa don't have
nasalization at all, except as a contextually determined feature of some
consonants:  basically initial /w/ and /r/ in Hidatsa and /w/ and /r/ in
clusters in Crow, if I remember correctly.  The rest of the languages come
very close to have nasality only in vowels, and, secondarily, in /w/ and
/r/ before nasal vowels.  Each languages has various exceptions and/or
complications to this.

There are a few sets that are nasal in some languages and oral in others.
The main instance that I recall is *hapa ~ haNpa 'ear of corn'.  This is
actually one reason for supposing that the set might be a loan.  In
Muskogean nasality is used to mark one of the verb aspects.  However, the
real reason for thinking of Muskogean in connection with this set is the
existence of a verb habali 'to form tassels (of corn plants)' in Choctaw.
I believe, however, that this form may be restricted to
Choctaw(-Chickasaw) in Muskogean.

Another unusual set is the one represented by wiNyaN 'woman' in Dakotan.
One might expect miNyaN.  The -yaN is nasalized by spreading from wiN-, so
the set is actually something like wiN-y-a or wiNy-a underlyingly,
depending on whether one takes the y as intrusive or part of the stem. I
think the -a is essentially comparable to the "epenthetic a" in other
nouns like s^uN'ka.  It is, in any event, similarly deleted in older
patterns of compounding for both kinds of stems.  Comparisons with other
branches of Siouan suggest that this stem is historically *wiNh(e), with
one idea as to why it doesn't nasalize w in a number of languages being
that the final h effects the nasalizability of the initial w.

JEK