Funny W

[Rankin, Robert L]

> Just to be sure we're clear here, by "nasally-released stop", I mean a full stop that is released as the corresponding nasal consonant, not as one that is preceded by one.  Thus, for *W I propose *pm/*bm, not *mb, and for *R I propose *tn/*dn, not *nd.  Of course, these might easily have reflexes mb and nd by metathesis, but that's not what I'm proposing for the originals.

I don't think it matters one way or the other whether we postulate w/rN, Nr/w, or Hr/w, w/rH as long as there are no conflicting correspondence sets.  What I'm writing as N or H (=h/?) here are all equally just "features" right now.  In favor of your idea of CN with a nasal release, I think you'll find in Riggs a notation that he heard Dakota (D-dialect) words /ob/ and comparable sequences as phonetically [obm] on occasion.  I included that in the paper I did at the Chicago SCLC 4 or 5 years ago.

> What you say above in the two sentences following "Additionally" seems to be: Since we know that some cases of *W and *R arose from clustering of *w or *r with an obstruentizing consonant, we can suppose that they all did: therefore laryngeals.  

No, just that we can hypothesize that.  

> In the remark from the previous posting quoted at the top, I was referring to phonotactic mechanisms with an eye to Occam's razor.  The laryngeal cluster model for *W and *R requires something happening in the throat which has since ceased to happen everywhere.  The nasally-released stop model can account for all the typical reflexes (*W > p, b, m, w; *R > t, d, n, l) simply by changing the relative timing and intensity of factors (oral closure, nasal opening, voicing) that are present in many of the reflexes.  Unlike the laryngeal cluster model, it does not require extra factors.

Yes, but voicing IS a laryngeal feature and very much subject to timing changes.  [Nasal] and [continuant] apply in other parts of the vocal tract.  I still think the "solutions" are all pretty much notational variants and can't really agree that one feature is more "natural" (or economical . . . whatever) in these instances.  We really need to look closely at languages like Mandan and Catawba where laryngeals were ignored by early workers to see if potential conditioning factors remain.  And I must say that "Occam's razor", so useful as an evaluation metric/procedure in synchronic phonology, is notoriously defective in explaining historical developments.  History tends to show a lot of variability and vacillation -- trends and counter-trends before things "shake out". I've seen it tried in the "theory of fewest moves" applied to both articulation and migration (geographically), and the actual facts, when we learn them, contravene it far too often to keep me happy. 

Bob