a phonetic mystery

[Rankin, Robert L]

>From: Pamela Munro
>I can't speak to the historical issue here, but I think there is a good
>reason why we might hear a difference between mní 'water' and mnínkte
>(as I would write it) 'I will go'. The vowel after the mn in 'water'
>seems to me to be a derived nasal vowel that acquires its nasality from
>the preceding nasal consonant, while the vowel after the mn in 'I will
>go' is an underlyingly nasal vowel (the future of every ablaut verb ends
>in -inkta/e, regardless of what consonant precedes). In fact, it's this
>underlying nasality that causes the expected bl- of 'I will go' to
>become mn- ...

It is often said (e.g. Fox's recent book on linguistic reconstruction) that
the methodologies of (internal) reconstruction and synchronic phonology are
identical and (by others) that the rules of synchronic phonology
recapitulate the historical processes that led to the present-day system. I
have strongly opposed this in a chapter that will appear in Blackwell's
Handbook of Historical Ling. Pam's examples are a nice case in point.
Historically, it is clearly 'water' that had the underlying nasal vowel, and
its consonants represent secondary nasalization, but synchronically, as both
David and Pam point out, the vowel has lost its underlying nasality. 'Go',
on the other hand, had the oral vowel *e, and it's nasalization is strictly
secondary, from *iN+kte, just as Pam says. The language has simply been
restructured and our synchronic and diachronic methodologies and rules (or
constraints, for those who believe in them) simply yield different results.

Synchronically in Dakotan it is probably no longer possible to associate the
/m/ of m-ni 'water', the /b/ of b-loka 'male' or the /p/ of 'p-te' 'buffalo
cow' with absolutive wa- (or, historically, in the case of these particular
nouns, the animate *wi-). It has been lexicalized, or "phoneticized" as part
of the noun root.

The parallel allomorphs of first singular actor wa-, however, must still be
associated in 1st person actor forms such as m-aNka 'I sit', m-uN 'I do/use'
(I can't recall which of those 2 uses m-), and m-niN- 'I will go-IRR'; b-le
'I go'; p-hu 'I arrive coming', etc. where there is still a clear 1st person
semantic association.

Bob