Re: THEORY: Re : THEORY: Semivowels

Christophe Grandsire scripsit:

>         Nasalisation is a strange feature in French. I think it is the only
> language where nasalisation doesn't spread from nasalised sounds to
> phonemically non-nasalised ones. What I mean is that in many language,
> the occurence of a /m/ or /n/ will nasalise the vowel before, or the
> vowel after, but it's not the case in French ('bonne' is pronounced
> /bOn/, not /bO~n/, to make it different from 'bon' /bO~/). Even
> languages that have phonemic nasal vowels don't behave like that (in
> Portuguese, the occurrence of /n/ or /m/ always nasalise the vowel
> before, for example).
Apparently that used to be true in French too, but then a de-nasalization
process operated to change /bO~n/ back to /bOn/.  It's at that point that
we can say nasal vowels are phonemic; otherwise the nasalization could
be interpreted as just allophonic.

--
John Cowan                                   cowan@ccil.org
       I am a member of a civilization. --David Brin