Re: Nasal semivowels/fricatives?

Christophe Grandsire wrote:
>At 20:31 16/02/00 -0500, you wrote:
>>Christophe Grandsire wrote:
>>> 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).
>>
>>So, if I understand correctly, the following sound would be nasalized?
>>I.e., ~da would be something like [nda~]?
>>
>
>Maybe slightly, but I'm not even sure of that. Anyway, I don't nasalise
>vowels after a normal nasal like /m/, so I don't do that either with those
>nasalised stops like ~b. It may be due to the fact that I'm French and that
>we control rather well nasalisation in our native language :) .
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.

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 ;-)

-kristian- 8)