Re: Nasal semivowels/fricatives?

Nik Taylor wrote:

>Kristian Jensen wrote:
>> This is an interesting case of how Christophe's being French has
>> hindered him from considering weakly nasalized vowels as nasal vowels.
>
>How can nasalization be weak or strong?  I'm not doubting you, I just
>can't figure it out in my own vocal tract.  It seems to me to be
>something that's either there or not there.
I'm not quite sure myself, but I think it has something to
do with how low the soft palate is held to keep the nasal
passage open. Professor Ladefoged measured the volume of air
flowing through the nose as a measure of the degree of nasality.
So I would think, by lowering the soft palate in varying
degrees, you can vary the amount of air flowing through your
nose.

An example of nasal flow patterns was illustrate by Ladefoged
for the French vowel /O/ in French words like 1) 'bonnet',
2) 'nonnette', and 3) 'non-être'. The vowel in 1) is oral
before a nasal, but contextually nasalized in the last part,
2) is considerably more nasalized as it is between two nasal
consonants, but is not as nasalized as 3), a phonologically
nasalized consonant in the same context.

While I'm at it, I may as well mention that Ladefoged has cited
Palantla Chinantec (an extinct Oto-Manguean language from
Mexico) as having three contrastive degrees of nasality.

Interesting stuff!!

-kristian- 8)