19-04-2020, 07:36 PM
(19-04-2020, 05:44 PM)Aga Tentakulus wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Not many Turkish words with "m" ?
My private Turkish interpreter just told me there are just as many as with other letters.
I believe that initial nasal was rare in Proto-Turkic. Many Turkic languages (but not Turkish) later developed an initial /m/ through a sound change of initial /b/ (I'm not an expert on this, but I believe that it picked up nasalisation from a following sound). Turkish itself and many Turkic languages borrowed words from Arabic and Persian which freely begin words with /m/. The loanwords occurred quite early, I believe, so even in the 1400s we might expect to see evidence of them.
They would need a strong argument why /m/ is never found word initial.