Re: Nasal semivowels/fricatives?

At 18:44 15/02/00 -0500, you wrote:
>
>> What I call
>> "nasalized stops" are real stops, that's to say the airstream passes a
>> little and then is blocked in both the oral and nasal cavities.
>
>Then how can it be nasal if it's blocked in the nasal cavity?
>
It seems that my description was wrong (I'm not a phonetician and am hardly
aware of what I'm doing when I try to pronounce a sound). Let's try to
describe sequentially what I do when I pronounce a 'nasalised stop':
First, The nasal cavity is a little open but the oral cavity is closed.
Then I close both the oral and nasal cavity, then I open both (whereas for
a simple stop I would open only the oral cavity). It's different from
nasals as (at least for me) the nasal cavity is never closed when I
pronounce them. Here comes the 'stop' quality of those nasalised stops that
the simple nasals lack.

It seems that I described the sound the other way round last time. It
happens to me a lot when I try to describe what I do. I don't know why
however. The nasalised stops I describe could well be something like
/mp_m/, i.e. a prenasalised stop with nasal release, with the difference
that the 'stop part' is more a quality than an actual articulation (don't
mind if I can't explain myself well, I didn't sleep a lot those last few
days).

                                                Christophe Grandsire
                                                |Sela Jemufan Atlinan C.G.

"Reality is just another point of view."

homepage : http://rainbow.conlang.org