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Re: Nasal semivowels/fricatives?

From:Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>
Date:Monday, February 21, 2000, 9:05
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