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Re: polish nasals (was: Re: Opinions on English)

From:Raymond Brown <ray.brown@...>
Date:Friday, September 22, 2000, 18:21
At 1:02 am +0200 21/9/00, lucasso wrote:
[....]
>> Poland, first in Krakóv and then almost on the southern border at Zakopane >> in the Tatra mountains. In both places I heard the first nasal clearly >> pronounced in the word: >> dzieokujeo (thank you) [hope the nasal hooks appear OK] > >well, it doesn't...
Sorry :=( [....]
>in the word final position there could be only nasalised e and o. in >standard polish the nasality of e is very weak and often completely lost.
That accounts for what I heard. Certainly I could detect no nasality with final "tailed e".
>the nasal o (written as a with a "tail") lost its nasality only in some >dialects and in standard polish always remains nasal.
I must confess I didn't hear enough Polish to notice this.
>and this "dzie,kuje," should sound (in SAMPA) [d_z\ENkujE]. there should be >this [N] >ESPECIALLY in Kraków and the neighbourhood.
It was! Sorry - I misunderstood your original. I thought you meant that "hooked e" was /E/ except before fricatives. Thus I was a bit puzzled as in Kraków and the neighbourhood the was a distinct nasal sound at the end of the first syllable, as you show above. But I guess you mean that the 'hooked' vowels are realized as _vowel + homorganic nasal consonant_ before a plosive (or other nasal?) but simply as a nasalized vowel before a fricative. And I guess that written _vowel + n_ is also pronounced simply as a nasal vowel before a fricative. Is that so? I said I wasn't an expert on Polish - just trying to make sense of the little I heard & what you had written. And what you have said makes it a lot clearer - thanks. What happens if these _vowel + n_ or a "hooked vowel" come before /l/ or /r/. I guess they'd be just nasal vowels, or is the nasalixation dropped entirely. Just curious. Ray. ========================================= A mind which thinks at its own expense will always interfere with language. [J.G. Hamann 1760] =========================================