Episode 23: Nasals

Glossonnnnnnommmmmia is comin’ through the nose this week: we’re talking about Nasals, both consonants and vowels – nasalized vowels, that is. Hosts Phil Thompson and Eric Armstrong discuss not only English’s 3 nasal consonants, but all the nasals the human mouth can utter. [note: Phil’s recording starts to sound echoey in the second half. That’s my fault for not editing it well. Sorry! Hope it isn’t too annoying!] Show Notes Velo-Pharyngeal Port - lifting and lowering the soft palate - ban vs. band as a way of feeling the action of the lifting of the soft palate - perhaps more noticeable on sing vs. sink Sonorant vs. Obstruent (both) - Sonorant is without turbulence or obstruction, generally a vowel or nasals, or L, approximants, like r, or glides/semivowels like w/j - Obstruent has an obstructed airflow; nasals are technically stops with a dropped velum soft palate - Nasal Consonants - in English - m - n - n̪ dentalized n before θ as in "tenth" - or in accents where the placement of alveolars is on the back of the teeth... - ŋ velar nasal – only final or intervocalic, never initial - ɲ palatal nasal "nya nya nya" teasing, some accented versions of /nj/ as in "onion" - ɱ – labiovelar: assimilation, usually n/m before v as in "invest, invert, invent, inventory" or f "symphony, camphor, influence, unfit"; may cause epenthetic dental p e.g. symphony [sɪɱp̚fənɨ] Syllabic Consonants - a consonant which forms a syllable on its own or forms the nucleus of the syllable (taking the place of a vowel, usually schwa) e.g. ambition, bacon, ship 'em or happen (with assimilation, as [hæpm̩] ) – immediately after an obstruent, as in leaden or chasm Nasal Plosion - The release of a plosive by lowering the soft palate so that air escapes through the nose - Hidden, sadden, sudden, leaden - e.g. on Ladefoged's site for A Course in Phonetics http://tinyurl.com/3r8yd6b - International - ɳ – vd. retroflex nasal in Indic languages e.g. Hindi, but also Norwegian, Swedish and Vietnamese (generally an assimilation of /r+n/ - ɲ – vd. palatal nasal, in Spanish (eñe), lots of other languages incl. French, Italian, Greek, - ŋ – vd. velar nasal, in some languages at the beginning of syllables, like Vietnamese, Thai, Shona, note Samoyedic group of Uralic language family, Nganasan language (only 1000 speakers in 1989, ethnologue says 500) it is in its name! - initial velar nasal in 146 languages - no initial velar in 88 languages - no velar nasal in 235 languages - ɴ – vd. uvular nasal, e.g. Japanese final /n/ as in Nihon - - Nasalized Vowels - example languages: French, Portuguese, Breton, Polish - In French they developed from Assimilation (the vowels took on nasality from the following nasal consonant which was then dropped. ) Some accents of French still have final /n/, as in Marseilles, where "accent" might be pronounced [aksaɲ] Example: Odette does her poem about her accent: http://tinyurl.com/3r6w9uq - Languages without Nasals - fewer the 2.3% of languages lack nasals - e.g. Puget sound native languages lack them - "The only other places in the world where this occurs is in a dialect of the Rotokas language of Papua New Guinea, where nasal stops are used only when imitating foreign accents (a second dialect does have nasal stops), and in some of the Lakes Plain languages of West Papua." - Denasal consonants - pathological (usually a cold) where m=b, n=d, ŋ=k