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Re: THEORY: Re : THEORY: Semivowels

From:John Cowan <cowan@...>
Date:Thursday, September 9, 1999, 16:48
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