polish nasals (was: Re: Opinions on English)

----- Original Message -----
From: Raymond Brown <ray.brown@...>
Sent: 19 IX 2000 22:18

[...]

> >2. according to many modern grammars there are even NO phonemic nasal
vowels
> >in polish. and from the phonetic point of view, there are 2 or 6 of them
(it
> >depends, i think, rather on speaker's manner), they occure only before
> >fircatives and at the end of the word,
>
> I'm certainly no expert on Polish, but this does not accord with my
> experience in Poland this summer.
>
> In view of what Lucasso writes above & what I heard, I guess there's
> probably a good deal of regional variation.  I was essentially in southern
i haven't travelled a lot, but i think standard polish is nowadays quite
strongly dominant, and it's rather hard to hear differences in the speech of
people from different cities. in the coutry they are proably stronger, but
it's hard for me to tell something more about it. i know that thanks to the
minority politics after '45 and just the economic factors (both resulted
mostly in migrations) the dialects have mixed and the standard became the
easiest tool of comunication for people grown up in different dialects.
there are only a few really distinct dialects. the only case i've heard a
real dialect in the real life (not used for stylistic purposes) this was in
the Tatra mountains. it was sometimes really hard to understand. it was
used, of course, only in the conversation between people knowing the dialect
and they speak standard when they talk to tourist etc. i must confess, i
don't know how the nasals in this dialects behave. i could check it if i
overcome the lazyness and go to the library...

why i have written that if there are 2 or 6 nasal vowels? all the people
pronounce the vowels marked by those hooked letters as nasal ones before
fricatives, but when it comes to loanwords in which there is VNS (S for any
fricative) sequence some people pronounce it as V~S (i belive i do it like
this) and some not, so for example:

szansa - 'chance' could be [Sa~sa] but also [Sansa]

so by the side of two "standard" nasal vowels ([E~] and [O~]) there could be
also [a~], [i~], [1~], [u~]


> 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... i recive all the conlang messages in western european
ISO...


> But there was no trace of any nasal sound on the final -e.
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.
the nasal o (written as a with a "tail") lost its nasality only in some
dialects and in standard polish always remains nasal.

and this "dzie,kuje," should sound (in SAMPA) [d_z\ENkujE]. there should be
this [N]
ESPECIALLY in Kraków and the neighbourhood.


> Those of our party who were essentially anglophone monoglots mangled the
> thing to sound like "Gin queer" - said in the non-rhotic manner, i.e.
/dZIn
> kwIa/    (Ach - makes me almost ashamed to be English!)
>
> Indeed, I consistently noticed that final vowels written with the 'nasal
> hook' were never nasalized.  But other nasal vowels seemed to retain their
> nasal sound irrespective of the consonant that followed.  Our guide came
> from Krakóv, so spoke the same way.  But I admit I didn't really hear
> enough to be sure of all the vagaries of behavior a non-final nasal might
> exhibit - but the finals seemed consistently unnasalized.
see above

--
lukasz korczewski