Re: rinya pronouns

En réponse à "H. S. Teoh" <hsteoh@...>:

> On Wed, Nov 22, 2000 at 04:03:08PM +0100, daniel andreasson wrote:
> [snip]
> > Today at lunch I came up with the pronominal paradigm of one
> > of the dialects of Rinya. This made me realize that I probably
> [snip]
> >       1SG              1PL
> >       OLD      NEW     OLD      NEW
> > AGT   imin     imï     ymin     ymï
>
> Hmm. I always thought that near a nasal consonant, vowels are always
> (unconsciously) nasalized? (Unless you're saying it quite slowly, of
> course.) Or is that just a phenomenon in some languages, not all?
>
Well, last time I said that, I received a ton of replies saying I was wrong, but
I'm still keeping on my opinion: indeed, nasality is a feature that spreads
quite easily in words, but the nature and the extend of spreading vary with
languages. Languages that have no phonemic vowels will tend to spread it at
least over the syllable (preceeding or following, depends) or, while languages
with phonemic nasals will have less spread. In this respect, I think French is
quite extreme as nasal spread is nearly, if not completely, absent. Words like
"belle" and "benne" have for me the same vowel [E] in them, no difference (maybe
, if I listen very carefully, I could hear an extremely short [E~] between the
[E] and the final [n], but it's so small that I'm not sure if I'm making this up
or if it really exists). I'm completely sure about it by testing the air flow
from my nose with a finger in front of it. It appears only at the very of the
[E], nearly as soon as the [n] begins, showing with relative accuracy that [E]
is not nasalised (or so little) before the [n]. But French is quite an exception
about it, French people being able to accurately hear the difference between,
say, [jan] "Yann" (a French firstname) and [ja~n] "Jan" (the actual
pronunciation of my boyfriend's firstname), a difference that Dutch people (at
least my boyfriend, and I don't think he is remarquable in that) fail to hear.
So, to finish, I'll repeat what I said in the beginning: nasal spread is a
common feature, but its extent varies greatly between languages, and it can even
be absent.

Christophe.