Initial and non-initial clusters of a nasal sonant and homorganic stop in the Balkan languages

• Main Author: Sawicka Irena
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Institute for the Serbian Language, Belgrade 2005-01-01
• Series: Južnoslovenski Filolog
• Online Access: http://www.doiserbia.nb.rs/img/doi/0350-185X/2005/0350-185X0561051S.pdf

The Balkan Sprachbund is a linguistic community which is defined by morph syntactic features. However it also has some phonetic peculiarities of which the most specifies ones are: 1. traces of the occurrence in all "proper" Balkan languages of the common phoneme (a nasal shwa) in Medieval Ages, and 2. specific functioning of the clusters containing a nasal sonant and a homorganic occlusive. The second feature is constituted by a set of various phenomena (quite trivial, as well as very unusual ones) which occur in Greek, Albanian, Macedonian, Italian, Rumanian. Processes regarding these clusters are extremely concentrated in the area of the central-western part of the Balkan Sprachbund. The common denominator of these - sometimes very different phenomena - is a tendency towards monophonemic value of the clusters in question. As a result of such a tendency an enormous number of options occur in the Balkan dialects - where clusters very often function as facultative realizations of voiced stops, or vice versa. The most unusual feature - when we regard it in European perspective - is the occurrence of the NT clusters at the beginning of words.