Re: Nasal semivowels/fricatives?

At 23:16 18/02/00 +0100, you wrote:
>
>This is an interesting case of how Christophe's being French has
>hindered him from considering weakly nasalized vowels as nasal vowels.
>Christophe, it is said that the nasalization of phonemically nasal vowels
>in French is a lot stronger than the phonemically nasal vowels of other
>languages, e.g. Portuguese. Professor Ladefoged has examined nasality of
>French vowels and has shown that vowels are somewhat nasalized when
>contiguous to nasals, though not as strongly as the phonemically nasal
>vowels. French can therefore be seen as having two degrees of vowel
>nasalization in the phonetic level, where the weakly nasalized vowels
>are allophones of oral vowels when contiguous to other nasals. This could
>explain why you said that 'you don't nasalize vowels after a normal nasal
>like /m/', and why you don't consider vowels nasalized after your so
>called 'nasalized stops' even though you have described them as having an
>open passage through the nasal cavity during the release. By definition,
>an open passage to the nasal cavity would clearly lead to a nasal sound.
>
That would explain why my boyfriend insists on not hearing the difference
between the words 'bon' and 'bonne' when I pronounce them. Still, I really
don't hear any nasalisation in the 'o' of 'bonne'. For me, it's clearly
oral (and I clearly hear the nasal vowels of Portuguese). Strange.

>Based on this and your own description of your 'nasalized stop', then what
>you describe must phonetically be [_nda~]. That is, a prenasalized stop
>with a nasalized release manifesting itself as a weak nasalization of
>the following vowel.
>
>This is quite an interesting sound actually. But it is also quite unusual
>in itself in that it is not likely to occur in a natural language unless
>there was a functional reason to have it. With regards to the release of
>a prenasalized stop, the unmarked form would have to be (AFAIK) an _oral_
>release, _not_ nasal. There would have to be a functional reason to
>nasalize the release of your prenasalized stops. Does your language have
>a contrastive set of prenasalized stops with oral release? If so, then
>your language has a functional reason to have this nasalized release. If
>not, then I guess your conlang isn't a human language ;-)
>
Then it's allright :) . The Sky People, speakers of Tj'a-ts'a~n are
certainly humanoid but certainly not humans (their blue skin is only the
most salient difference between them and us). So I guess I can do pretty
much what I want :))) .

                                                Christophe Grandsire
                                                |Sela Jemufan Atlinan C.G.

"Reality is just another point of view."

homepage : http://rainbow.conlang.org