Timeline for How to analyze nasal vowels next to nasal consonants
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
14 events
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| Oct 9, 2023 at 3:12 | vote | accept | Graham H. | ||
| Oct 8, 2023 at 16:38 | comment | added | jlawler | Malay nasalizes vowels in the syllable after a nasal consonant, not before, like English. This causes problems for learners. Acehnese has a much more complex system, with two varieties of nasal consonant plus phonemic nasal vowels, and several ways to distinguish them, not all of which are used. | |
| Oct 8, 2023 at 1:43 | history | edited | brass tacks | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Oct 8, 2023 at 1:40 | comment | added | brass tacks | @GrahamH.: Originally, vowels were nasalized before a nasal consonant in French. Then syllable-final nasal consonants were lost. Then nasal vowels became denasalized before syllable-initial nasal consonants (which remained), while staying nasal in other contexts. That happened a long time ago, though. The details of where nasal vowels occur in modern French are complicated, but no variety that I know of was unaffected by that denasalization. | |
| Oct 8, 2023 at 1:16 | comment | added | Graham H. | Sorry, one last question for your great answer. If the standard transcriptions are based on historical pronunciations, does that mean there might have been a time when some speakers did phonetically merge the oral and nasal vowels before /n/ and /m/? Might there be some minority of speakers today for whom that’s still the case? | |
| Oct 7, 2023 at 21:57 | history | edited | brass tacks | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Oct 7, 2023 at 21:52 | comment | added | brass tacks | @GrahamH.: Like any IPA transcription, French IPA transcriptions are influenced by phonemic considerations. As with English, an additional factor reducing the phonetic character of IPA transcriptions of French is that the conventional transcriptions were established something like a century ago. | |
| Oct 7, 2023 at 21:48 | history | edited | brass tacks | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Oct 7, 2023 at 21:43 | history | edited | brass tacks | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Oct 7, 2023 at 21:40 | comment | added | Graham H. | I know /ɛ̃/ is typically realized lower than /ɛ/ (and I think /ɔ̃/ may be realized higher than /ɔ/), but clearly the creators of standard descriptions don't find those height distinctions to be phonologically relevant enough for phonemic transcription (which may or may not be the best choice). | |
| Oct 7, 2023 at 21:39 | comment | added | brass tacks | @GrahamH.:It's definitely the case that oral vowel phonemes are not pronounced the same way as nasal vowel phonemes before a nasal consonant in French. I'm not sure about the phonetics. For comparison, British English has a phonemic vowel length distinction, but its vowels also separately have different phonetic length depending on their context: something similar could be true of nasality in French. | |
| Oct 7, 2023 at 21:37 | history | edited | brass tacks | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Oct 7, 2023 at 21:37 | comment | added | Graham H. | Regarding your last statement - if chienne = [ʃjɛn], does that mean oral vowels are not actually nasalized before nasal consonants in French like they are in English? If so, that would kind of render the whole question faulty, at least for French (though the situation I described could exist in other languages). | |
| Oct 7, 2023 at 21:32 | history | answered | brass tacks | CC BY-SA 4.0 |