Re: Nasal vowels (was Re: French spelling scheme)

En réponse à Raymond Brown <ray.brown@...>:

>
> Which is perhaps why the French have only low nasal vowels.
>
> But AFAIK there's no real reason why other nasal vowels shouldn't occur.
> Indeed, Portuguese has both mid and high nasal vowels.
>
> Old French, indeed, also had mid & high nasal vowels, as well as two
> nasal
> diphthongs: /a~/, /e~/, /i~/, /o~/, /y~/; /e~i/, /o~i/.
> (There were also nasalized rising diphthongs; but the first element of
> these became semivowels /j/, /w/ or /H/ early on.)
>
> Between the 13th & 16th centuries, the nasal vowels become lower
> resulting
> in the familiar ones of modern French, thus:
> /e~/ --> /E~/
> /i~/ --> /e~/ --> /E~/
> /o~/ --> /O~/
> /y~/ --> /2~/ --> /9~/
>
> The two diphthongs had been reduced to /E~/ and /wE~/ by the 16th cent.
> Apparently some 17th cent. grammarians tried to preserve a difference
> between the /E~/ derived from /e~i/ and /E~/ derived from /i~/, but in
> vain.
>
> Apparently, in the common speech of the 16th & 17th centuries /a~/ and
> /O~/
> were often confused (as they inevitably seem to be by anglophones) but,
> except, I'm told, for a few areas, the two vowels are distinct in modern
> French.  However over the past half century or so, there has been a
> marked
> tendency for /9~/ to become unrounded and merge with /E~/, so that, e.g.
> _lundi_ is now usually pronounce /lE~di/.
>
Well, I wanted to answer myself, but your reply is better than anything I could
have written Ray!

One footnote: Though I'm only 25, I still use quite often the phoneme /9~/, even
though it often has the allophone /E~/ in very fast speech. In fact, I use /9~/
in the extent that I use it even when saying "hein?" (French grunt-like phoneme
meaning "what?" and usually pronounced /E~/). I don't think I will ever get rid
of /9~/: I like that sound too much :) .

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

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