Dental-alveolar Consonants and [ATR] Vowel Distinction in Western Nilotic

抄録

Some predecessors reconstructed the Proto Western Nilotic (PWN) or Proto Nilotic (PN) consonant system with stops based on the phonemic contrasts at five points of articulation. They assumed that the contrastive opposition between dental and alveolar stops had existed in PWN, without submitting evidence to support their reconstruction. In fact, the distinction between dental and alveolar plosives did not exist in PWN. The reconstructed dental-alveolar phonemes (such as a voiceless and voiced plosive, and a nasal) had been pronounced phonetically as a dental before a [−ATR] vowel and as an alveolar before a [+ATR] vowel in PWN. The reconstructed dental-alveolar phonemes split into independent dental and alveolar phonemes in the course of the development of modern languages. PN did not have the contrastive opposition between dental and alveolar consonants, either.