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

From:Levi Tooker <nerd525@...>
Date:Wednesday, April 10, 2002, 4:48
--- 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/) __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Tax Center - online filing with TurboTax http://taxes.yahoo.com/

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Michael Poxon <m.poxon@...>