Re: PHONO: Nasal assimilation (was: An incongruent orthography: Maggel)

--- Jonathan Knibb <jonathan_knibb@...> wrote:
> Roger Mills wrote:
> >>>
> John Cowan wrote:
> >
> >I take this to be the sound of "n" in Italian
> "inferno".  All Italian
> >nasals adopt the place of articulation of a
> following consonant
> >(and thus any m/n distinction is neutralized) and
> that even across
> >word boundaries:  "con Paulo e con Carlo" is
> /com'pauloecoN'karlo/.
> >So "nf" is pronounced with a labiodental nasal.
>
> Ditto in Spanish, though speakers seem to vary [n] ~
> [N] before /x/.
> <<<
>
> Erm, ditto in my English (L1) pronunciation!  Am I
> unusual in this?  I had
> been labouring under the assumption that this
> phenomenon was basically
> universal.
>
> Jonathan.
This also happens sometimes when I'm not speaking
slowly in my (Eastern American) dialect of English.
For example:

"making bread" /%mEIkImbrEd/
"fountain pen" /%faU~?mpEn/ (I know, strange dialect
;)
"in Canada" /IN%ke@n@d@/

But not in all instances. /m/ in particular seems to
resist this trend:

"climb down" /klaImdaUn/
"damn cat" /de@mk&t/

Sometimes it even fails to happen in the same word
across morpheme boundaries:

"pancake" /%pe@nkEIk/
"bonbon" /%banban/
"longbow" /%laNboU/

(Also note that in my dialect, /&/ changes to /e@/
before /m/ and /n/ and to /e/ before /N/)

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