Introduction

Unlike most of the types of segments which are the topics of chapters in this volume, nasals have been the subject of a good earlier survey. In fact, the study by Ferguson (1963) on nasals has served in many ways as the model of an article on universals of segment types. Ferguson's article provided a major part of the stimulus for the organization of a conference devoted to nasals and nasalization (Ferguson, Hyman and Ohala 1975). For this reason, this chapter will largely take the form of a discussion of the various “assumptions about nasals” put forward by Ferguson, checking them against the data in UPSID to provide the quantification which is lacking in Ferguson's article and is only partially provided by Crothers (1975) working from an early version of the Stanford Phonology Archive. However, before this discussion, some summary information on the types of nasal consonants included in the UPSID data file will be presented.

Types of nasals

There are 1057 nasals in the file, of which the great majority, 934 or 88.4%, are simple plain voiced nasals. There are a further 50 nasals which are plain voiced but have distinctive length or a secondary articulation. Only 36 or 3.4% are voiceless, a number almost equaled by the laryngealized nasals (34 or 3.2%). There are also 3 breathy voiced nasals reported (from Hindi-Urdu, 016, and !Xũ, 918). The distribution of nasals by place of articulation is given in Table 4.1.