world's languages, but is not at all universal. In modern French, for example, vowels before a nasal are oral. That they used to be nasalized, like the vowels before lost nasals, is indicated by certain phonetic changes not always reflected in the orthography: Fr. femme "woman" /fam/ (with the lowering of (nasalized ) to *ã prior to denasalization). Note 2: unusually for a split, the history of the French innovation, even including some changes in vowel cavity features, can be readily inferred by internal reconstruction. This is because the contrastive feature [nasal] in a vowel system usually has a nasal in its history, which makes for straightforward surmises. There are also clear alternations, as "good" (masc.) vs. (fem.), while such pairs as /fin/ "fine" (fem.) and (masc.) together with derivatives like raffiné /rafine/ "refined" indicate what happened to nasalized *i. Phonemic split was a major factor in the creation of the contrast between voiced and voiceless fricatives in English. Originally, to oversimplify a bit, Old English fricatives were voiced between voiced sounds and voiceless elsewhere. Thus /f/ was [f] in fisc "fish", fyllen "to fill" [fyllen], hæft "prisoner", ofþyrsted [ofθyrsted] "athirst", líf "life", wulf "wolf". But in say the dative singular of "life", that is lífe, the form was [li:ve] (as in English alive, being an old prepositional phrase on lífe); the plural of wulf, wulfas, was [wulvas], as still seen in wolves. The voiced fricative is typically seen in verbs, too (often with variations in vowel length of diverse sources): gift but give, shelf but shelve. Such alternations are to be seen even in loan words, as proof vs prove (though not as a rule in borrowed plurals, thus proofs, uses, with voiceless fricatives). Note 1: unlike the French example, there is no chance of recovering the historical source of the alternations in English between /s θ f/ and /z ð v/ merely through inspection of the modern forms. The conditioning factor (original location of the voiced alternants between vowels, for example) is quite lost and with little reason to even suspect the original state of affairs; and anyway the original distributions have been much disturbed by analogical leveling. Worthy and (in some dialects) greasy have voiced fricative (next to the voiceless ones in worth and grease) but adjectives in -y otherwise do not alternate: bossy, glassy, leafy, earthy, breathy, saucy, etc (cf. glaze, leaves, breathe, and note that