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

John Cowan wrote:


>Michael Poxon scripsit:
>
>> Surely all these instances are just assimilation of a nasal to a
following
>> homorganic stop, which explains why the versions with -m don't work;
>
>But they *do* work in Italian; the nasal is forced to be homorganic to
>the stop no matter what the nasal's nominal place of articulation is.
That's true, but then, the only normal final nasal in Italian is /n/ (unless
memory is failing again).  Same in Spanish, despite a few loan in /-m/,
which give some speakers problems, i.e. "álbum ~ álbun", or dialectally even
"álbung".

Buginese, with only /-N/ assimilates it to a following vd. stop.

And Engl., like Indonesian, has contrastive final nasals (more functional
load?), so we have to be more careful about assimilating them......(?)

Nonetheless, Engl. fast speech rules seem clearly to allow assimilation,
though /m/ does seem to be a little resistant, with a tendency to insert a
[p] rather than assimilate--
comfort ['cVmpfR=t] rather than ['cV__f@rt] (I disremember X-Sampa lab-dent.
m)

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