Biblioteca Digital Curt Nimuendajú

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Cadernos de Etnolingüística
volume 11, número 1, novembro/2024, e110101

Reconstruction of nasality and other aspects of A'ingae phonology

Chelsea Sanker & Scott AnderBois

We propose a reconstruction of several sound changes in the history of A'ingae, a language isolate spoken in Ecuador and Colombia, using evidence from the phonology and lexicon of the modern language. Crucial to this reconstruction process is distinguishing ordinary inherited lexical items from borrowed forms, ideophones, and forms which are morphologically complex, each of which may sometimes exhibit different patterns. The major element of the reconstruction is a set of related changes in nasality. We derive the prenasalized series of stops and affricates from the voiceless unaspirated series, based on reanalysis of preceding nasal codas, which would have been the only permitted codas other than glottal stops. The voiceless unaspirated and prenasalized series became contrastive word-initially as the result of deletion of certain word-initial nasal vowels. Coda nasals also coalesced with following glides, producing a new palatal nasal phoneme. Remaining nasal codas later developed into nasality on vowels. We also propose a set of more speculative palatalization processes, alterations to the velar approximant, and developments involving diphthongs. All of these changes have substantially altered the phonological appearance of A'ingae. Improving our understanding of the form it had further in the past may facilitate identification of its affiliation with a language family or identification of loanwords.