Whence aspirated stops and nasal vowels?

[vokzhen]

I wonder to what extent it happens with /p/ and /k/ - I've paid less attention to it.
/ka.ˈpi.ʝa/ [ka.ˈpi.ʝa] capilla 'chapel' (for comparison)
/res.ˈpwes.ta/ [reh.ˈpweh.tʰa] respuesta 'answer' but
/es.ˈpi.na/ [eh.ˈpʰi.na] espina 'thorn'
/es.ˈpa.ra.go/ [eh.ˈpʰa.ra.ɣo] espárrago 'asparagus'

Maybe it's not about -t- and being tonic or not but about what follows? The /we/ diphthong seems to block it. But I'm not sure, it's so subtle, and the -esta has a very notable aspirate t.

Does /we/ block it in other instances too, or is this something like Grassman's law where two aspirates in a row (hCʰVhCʰ) is forbidden and instead the first stays unaspirated (hCVhCʰ)?

[Thry]

No instances occurred to me before... but trying to invoke some now:
escueto: ehkwéto "scarce"
(I can't think of one with -stue-), but estruendo is very obviously aspirated

It does seem aspirated. Maybe respuesta's is labialized and it interferes? It's just very subtle, they're allophones for me so I'm not the best one to hear it, but it's just so similar to normal [p]. Most likely the aspiration is there though and very faint *says transpuesto over and over and squints to hear the subtle difference*

I don't think two aspirates in a row are forbidden, plenty of past verbs like estuviste which would be ehthuvíhthe etc.

[Zaarin]

CatDoom and Nortaneous mention aspirate fricatives - I was wondering if there was such a thing, so thank you, too.

The languages of Western America, especially California and the Pacific Northwest, have some very typologically odd fricatives. Many in the Northwest have fricative ejectives; Tlingit even has the elsewhere unheard of /xʼʷ χʼʷ/, and even the non-labialized versions are pretty scarce outside the area.

[vokzhen]

I don't think two aspirates in a row are forbidden, plenty of past verbs like estuviste which would be ehthuvíhthe etc.

Those aren't in a row though, unless the /β/ is dropped to [ehtʰwihtʰe]. Grassmann's only operated when they're in adjacent syllables, intervening syllables blocks it, which by my understanding is more common than allowing it to operate across the whole word. (Granted maybe there's others examples that are in adjacent syllables that don't dissimilate).

[Thry]

What about prestaste? ('you lent')

[pɾeʰ.ˈtʰaʰ.tʰe]

[Ketumak]

it's not only coda /s/ ... most codas are [h] and trigger aspiration in my dialect ... basically any plosive is [h]

So, as n and m are plosives, could they nasalise a preceding vowel, then disappear whilst aspirating a following consonant? Like:

VNC > ṼNC > ṼCʰ

[Thry]

No, I wasn't counting nasals, since they're analyzed separately most of the time - I meant p, t, k, b, d, g... nasals and liquids don't trigger that.

The exception is _nsC_ which can do that; monstruo - [ˈmõʰ.ˈtʰɾwo] but by far the majority of people I know have [ˈmoʰ.ˈtʰɾwo]. Nasalization works oddly in my dialect, and I don't know the exact rules, but for instance mejor is nasalized as mehõ or sth.

[vokzhen]

it's not only coda /s/ ... most codas are [h] and trigger aspiration in my dialect ... basically any plosive is [h]

So, as n and m are plosives

They're not plosives, but they are stops. Even so, I've only rarely seen the term "stop" used to include nasals except in dictionary definitions, it usually seems to be usually used synonymously with plosive, and when a paper, etc does use "stop" to mean both plosives and nasals they usually explicitly say it.
EDIT: I guess after looking it up, there's not much "official" agreement. I've never seen "plosive" to include nasals though, and every time "stop" includes nasals, as far as I'm aware, it's been laid out explicitly that the author's including nasals.

[zompist]

I knew there was some "unexpected nasality" somewhere in Portuguese, but I finally thought of it: muito /ˈmuĩtu/, from Latin multus.

It seems to be a one-off; I can't find any other m- words with an unexpected nasal.

[Thry]

mim

[Sumelic]

also sim/assim

[zompist]

Ooh, (as)sim is a real poser. Possibly by analogy with não?

[Thry]

I don't think so. To be fair I don't know the exact etymology, but that -n is surely a regular phonetical development.

You may think it comes directly from VL *ad sic, but it's not a phonetically irregular nasalization, just a previous irregular appearance of an "-n" that nasalized. Extremaduran has "asín/asina" and Astur-Leonese has "ansina", no nasalizations (for the first segment -n, though unrelated, cf. French ainsi).

This says asina may be of Arabic origin itself.

It says "from asen, adverb of likelihood, from Persian".

sim could be then from assim, and maybe as you said under the influence of não. Compare with "si", the reflexive third person oblique, that is not nasalized.

[Thry]

Galician has "min" for "mim", but "si" for "sim/si", and "así" for "assim", btw. Though I dunno how much of that is standarized Castilian influence.

[Šọ̈́gala]

yep -- mostly an areal feature of East Asia. most extensive in Tibetan (esp. Cone) but also present in Burmese, Korean, some Hmongic, and dialects of Pumi. generally not used in conlangs, along with all the other weird shit in East Asia. also appears in some American langs. Mongolic and Armenian occasionally pattern fricatives (only unvoiced fricatives in Armenian I think) with aspirated stops.

http://www.academia.edu/2118759/Proto-Q ... nt_Changes
http://www.academia.edu/3318754/A_contr ... fricatives
http://www.academia.edu/3318814/The_ris ... ves_poster_

and apparently some speakers of Scottish English have (nonphonemic) *pre*aspirated fricatives
http://www.academia.edu/2940161/Non-nor ... cteristics

A notable example from Burmese: Aung San Suu Kyi [àʊɴ sʰáɴ sṵ tɕì]

[Šọ̈́gala]

Several languages of New Caledonia have interesting sources of both aspirated stops and nasal vowels. Aspirated stops often derive from geminates, e.g. Pwapwâ tʰai < *ssa-i < *sasa-i. Vowels seem to nasalize out of nowhere sometimes, while other times they come from oral vowels adjacent to nasals, and in a couple languages they come from oral vowels after /h/.

I had never heard of rhinoglottophilia before this thread, but it's interesting to notice that, in my dialect anyway, the only English word that has a distinctive nasal vowel is "huh".

[Šọ̈́gala]

I have looked for these on the wider internet, but not had much luck. I turned up an old paper arguing that aspirated descended from glottalised stops. That may well be one source, but there seem to be quite a few languages around with both.

I suppose a language could develop glottalised stops which turn into aspirates and then later develop glottals again. Or maybe two types of glottalised stop are involved, one turning into aspirates, one not?

Are there any other theories as to where aspirated stops come from?

In Old Tibetan, evidently aspirated stops and tenuis were in complementary distribution, with aspirates appearing word-initially or following a nasal stop (e.g. mtha'-yas), and tenuis appearing elsewhere. The difference started to become contrastive due to loan words from languages with tenuis available in all positions (such as Chinese) and then it became pervasively contrastive due to so many "prefixed" consonants becoming silent. Later in Tibetan, more voiceless aspirates developed from voiced sounds, as was happening a little earlier in Chinese.

In Oklahoma Cherokee there are complicated processes that place /h/ in various positions, which can result in aspirated stops. I've read about the processes but didn't understand them. It's all in the reference grammar.

In my conlang, I simply decided that voiceless stops were originally aspirated before a stressed syllables and tenuis elsewhere. Later, there were changes to the stress patterns, resulting in minimal pairs of aspirate vs. tenuis. I seem to recall seeing something like that in a natlang, but I don't remember what exactly.

[Travis B.]

Several languages of New Caledonia have interesting sources of both aspirated stops and nasal vowels. Aspirated stops often derive from geminates, e.g. Pwapwâ tʰai < *ssa-i < *sasa-i. Vowels seem to nasalize out of nowhere sometimes, while other times they come from oral vowels adjacent to nasals, and in a couple languages they come from oral vowels after /h/.

I had never heard of rhinoglottophilia before this thread, but it's interesting to notice that, in my dialect anyway, the only English word that has a distinctive nasal vowel is "huh".

Non-allophonic nasal vowels are found here in neah [nɛ̃(ː)], which could be a rare example of progressive nasal assimilation in English, but notably not in nah [na(ː)]. This of course is aside from plain vowel nasalization from following consonants, even if they are elided.

[vokzhen]

I had never heard of rhinoglottophilia before this thread, but it's interesting to notice that, in my dialect anyway, the only English word that has a distinctive nasal vowel is "huh".

There's a few other interjections and such that have phonemic nasalization for me. Uh-huh (affirmative) /ə̃'hə̃/ and uh-uh (negative) /ʔə̃ʔə̃/ and hee-haw (donkey braying) /hĩ hɔ̃/.

[Seirios]

As others have mentioned, nasal vowels don’t have to come from VN specifically, but nasality in vowels often originates from assimilation to other nasal segments (which can also include preceding or nearby nasal consonants, or other nasal vowels). This is the general pattern I see, but the set of languages I’m familiar with might be biased.

What’s weird is that as far as I know, nasality in consonants most often also originates from assimilation to other nasal segments, like other nasal consonants or nasal vowels. (By "originates" above of course, I'm only referring to cases when an origin can be determined. Some sounds may have been nasal for as far back as we can tell.)

What I mean by this is, most languages I can think of that have a development (synchronic or diachronic) of a non-nasal consonant to a nasal consonant do so only in the presence of another nasal segment.

Example: In the history of Korean and Latin, you get regressive assimilation from nasal consonants to preceding non-nasal plosives. In Korean this is fairly recent and still reflected in the orthography, so I won’t give any examples. In Latin, two examples are *swepnos > somnus, *dh2pnom > damnum.

There are plenty of examples of languages where nasal vowels cause synchronic assimilation of voiced plosive phonemes, or sometimes other voiced phonemes, to nasal allophones.

But I can’t think of many examples of nasal sounds arising from only non-nasal sounds. The opposite seems more common (the “lazy pronunciation” of /n/ as [l] in Cantonese, the currently in-progress denasalization of word-initial nasal stops in Korean). It makes me wonder why nasals don’t get eliminated entirely from a language... although as long as a language preserves some nasals, nasality can always spread from them to other sounds, so I guess the extinction of nasals is not theoretically inevitable after all.

I guess voiced plosives can sometimes evolve into nasals? Japanese voiced plosives are the first example I can think of, though they might not be the best, since I've read somewhere that they might historically have been pronounced as prenasalized stops. But anyway, in some modern varieties of Japanese, intervocalic /g/ is pronounced as [ŋ]. And IIRC there's a variety of Rotokas with a phoneme inventory where voiced plosives and nasals are in free variation allophonically.

The only tendency I can think of that causes nasals to arise completely from non-nasals has already been mentioned, rhinoglottophilia.

I remember seeing a southwestern Jin/Guanhua Chinese dialect that has completely nasalized a vowel (final) that is now /ɔ/ (i.e. /ɔ̃/), descending from /ɑ/. Now I see what might have happened, and thanks a lot!

[KathTheDragon]

Spontaneous nasalisation is also possible, though. Perhaps it happens only as a dissimilatory process, as attested in Hittite, where /w/ becomes /m/ adjacent to /u/, as in "we see" umēni < *u-weni

[cntrational]

Similar to the /sC/ and /Cr/ examples given above for Spanish and Thai, Sanskrit voiceless aspirates originate in sequences of PIE stops and pharyngeals. This is the reason for PIE's strange stop system.

[Ketumak]

I'm still reading this thread and thanks again for the great pool of ideas. I'm playing around with them now trying to get a good balance of phonemes in both ancestor and modern languages.

Something else occurs to me, if aspiration can come from plosive clusters and voiced stops (amongst other things), could it also come from the co-articulates: k͡p g͡b ?

[vokzhen]

I'm still reading this thread and thanks again for the great pool of ideas. I'm playing around with them now trying to get a good balance of phonemes in both ancestor and modern languages.

Something else occurs to me, if aspiration can come from plosive clusters and voiced stops (amongst other things), could it also come from the co-articulates: k͡p g͡b ?

It's probably not impossible, but aspiration in consonant clusters is, as far as I understand it, a method of maintaining the distinction between the first and second sound, instead of leveling the distinction (kp > kʰp versus the more common kp > k̚p > ʔp or pp). I wouldn't expect it unless, on a phonological level, /k͡p/ denatured into /k+p/, which would probably require other changes in the sound system as most languages I know of with /k͡p/ either disallow consonant clusters or contrast it with clusters of /kp/.

Off the top of my head, I believe the most common change to /g͡b/ is implosivizing to [ɓ].

[CatDoom]

It's perhaps worth noting that co-articulated consonants are different from clusters, both in terms of how they're articulated and how they sound. In some languages they can contrast with clusters, even word-initially. I think they can arise from clusters, but once kp becomes k͡p, it's usually treated as a unique, unitary stop, just like k and p.