Dental Sonorants or Approximants

[David Costa]

This r/n/l/y variation is also found all over New England Algonquian.
They're all reflexes of Proto-Eastern Algonquian */r/.  Some poorly attested
Algonquian languages of Maryland even have 'z' for this sound. No voiced
interdental fricatives, however.

Dave Costa


> On Wed, 17 Mar 2004, Alan Hartley wrote: There were Ojibway dialects at
> various times and places with reflexes r, l, and n for Proto-Algonquian l;
> it's n in modern O.)

> Rankin: Might have something to do with the fact that Cree, like Siouan, has
> the [dh, n, r, l, y] variation for its dental approximant phoneme.

> It seems like this is characteristic of all of the large Northeastern dialect
> chains.  In Siouan we might say that we have two or three of these chains,
> e.g., Dakotan (Te l ~ n, Sa d ~ n, Ya d ~ n, As n, St n - and really these all
> alternate with y in historically unclustered contexts, too), and Dhegiha (OP
> dh ~ n, Ks y ~ l ~ n, Os dh ~ r ~ l ~ n, Qu d ~ n, with the first alternant in
> Ks and OS being the unclustered alternant). Winnebago and Ioway-Otoe are a bit
> too far apart to be called dialects, but Winnebago has r ~ n, and IO has
> something that is usually written r ~ n at the moment, but has been written l
> ~ n in the past.  In all cases where there is an n alternant, this is what
> occurs before nasal vowels, albeit not all nasal vowels, and some n's seem to
> have a different source. If there's only an n variant, then n occurs
> everywhere.  (However, I'm not completely positive this is a fair
> characterization of Assiniboine or Stoney.)

> Outside of Mississippi Valley Siouan, in Missouri River Siouan or
> Crow-Hidatsa, Kaschube writes r for Crow (perhaps an arbitrary choice of a
> neutral symbol for the underlying entity), while the current popular
> orthography writes d ~ l ~ n, depending on context.  Hidatsa specialists have
> somewhat similar ranges of practices, but I think at present they are writing
> n ~ r, depending on context.  These languages don't have nasal vowels, and
> Crow n occurs in rr clusters (nn) and, I think finally, while in Hidatsa it
> occurs at least initially and probably also in clusters, though I don't recall
> the details.