Nasal Vowel Evolution in Romance (Oxford linguistics) Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)Are you looking to buy Nasal Vowel Evolution in Romance (Oxford linguistics)? Here is the right place to find the great deals. we can offer discounts of up to 90% on Nasal Vowel Evolution in Romance (Oxford linguistics). Check out the link below:

>> Click Here to See Compare Prices and Get the Best Offers

Nasal Vowel Evolution in Romance (Oxford linguistics) ReviewRodney Sampson's monograph NASAL VOWEL EVOLUTION IN ROMANCE is an exhaustive look at how nasalization of vowels has affected sound changes in the Romance languages, the whole family from Galician and Portuguese across to Dalmatian and Romanian. Though only Portuguese and French have developed independent vowel phonemes, nasalization at the allophonic level can explain shifts such as raising or retraction in many other Romance languages.
The opening chapter discusses the phonetic aspects of vowel nasalization, that is, how the speech organs move differently in articulating nasal sounds than oral sounds. Even if the remainder of the book doesn't refer to this overtly, it is interesting to understand the physical underpinnings of the process. Then follows a chapter on the Latin background. From then on, each chapter focuses on a different branch: French, non-standard varieties of langue d'oil, Occitan, Catalan and Spanish, Galician-Portuguese, Rheto-Romance, Italo-Romance, Sardinian and Corsican, and Balkan Romance. The book's conclusion examines what support Romance might give to the study of typology and universals. Sampson identifies three contexts for nasalization, /VNC/, /VN#/ and /VNV/. The basic scheme of each chapter is tracking how vowels developed in each of these contexts, from the first distinct Vulgar Latin dialect through intermediary proto-languages up to what we have today.
Far too many monographs on Romance phenomena cover only the big languages, and the inclusion of Rheto-Romance, Sardinian and Balkan Romance here is admirable. But Sampson goes deeper than that, including data from a great variety of dialects that might normally be obscured by the standard language. Thus, for example, we get details of little-known Romanian dialects that have nasalized intervocalic *r in all positions, while Gascon is recognized as being far enough outside mainstream Occitan to merit an independent look. At the end of the book we find some maps which helpfully present the distribution of isoglosses in a visual manner.
The downside of the book is a large amount of typos, some of which should have been caught by any editor. It's worth seeking a table of errata before looking at chapters outside your field of expertise.Nasal Vowel Evolution in Romance (Oxford linguistics) OverviewDrawing on a wide range of philological and linguistic materials, Rodney Sampson provides for the first time a detailed comparative study tracing the rise and pattern of the evolution of nasal vowels in Romance; a family of language in which vowel nasalization has been richly represented. Developments across all the standard varieties and some non-standard varieties are considered, enabling broad characteristics of vowel nasalization in Romance to be identified.

Want to learn more information about Nasal Vowel Evolution in Romance (Oxford linguistics)?

>> Click Here to See All Customer Reviews & Ratings Now