LINGUIST List 5.1018

Wed 21 Sep 1994

Sum: Nasal vowels

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1. Michael Reese, Summary: Nasal vowels

I'd like to thank everyone who responded to my query about
languages with two degrees of nasal vowels. The language
I had originally read about was Palantla Chinantec, first
described by Merrifield (1963). The language contrasts
orality, light nasality and heavy nasality, shown below:

haa haa~ ha~a~
'such, so' 'spread open' 'foam,froth'
 3rd pers;prog asp

The tilde (~) indicates nasalization of the preceding
segment. All forms are low-mid tones. In Palantla Chinantec,
light nasalization marks animacy (personal communication
Bill Merrifield, 1994). The transcription of the vowel
as geminate follows Ladefoged and Maddieson (1995).

The impressionistic analysis of nasality was confirmed in
measurements conducted by Wang and Ladefoged (reported
in Ladefoged 1971). Ladefoged and Maddieson (1995)
describe the three-way contrast as: oral, oral-nasal
diphthong and nasal monophthong.

Mark Liberman reports that Mawukakan (described in Moussa
Bamba's 1991 UQAM dissertation) exhibits a similar
three way contrast. In this language, however, the
oral-nasal diphthong triggers changes that the fully
nasal monophthong doesn't.

Other languages were also reported to show a three
way contrast in nasality where one environment included
adjacency to a nasal consonant: English, French and
(arguably) Portuguese.

Hockett (1955) notes without data that languages can
exhibit a three-way contrast in nasality (p. 29).

I'd like to thank the following people for their
responses, suggestions and help:

 Don Churma Robert Davis
 Patrick Farrell Philip Hamilton
 John Kaufmann Peter Ladefoged
 Mark Liberman Mike Maxwell
 Bill Merrifield Larry Trask

Suggested References

Almeida, Anto'nio. 1976. "The Portuguese nasal vowels: phonetics
 and phonemics", in _Readings_in_Portuguese_Linguistics_,
 Ju"rgen Schmidt-Radefeldt, ed. New York: North Holland
 Publishing Co.

Bamba, Moussa. 1991. _De_l'interaction_d'accent_et_de_tone_.
 Ph.D. diss., UQAM.

Cohn, Abigail. 1993. "Nasalization in English: Phonology or Phonetics"
 _Phonology_ 10: 43-81.

Hockett, Charles. 1955. _A_Manual_of_Phonology_. Internation Journal
 of American Linguistics, Memoir 11. Baltimore: Waverly P.

Ladefoged, Peter. 1971. _Preliminaries_to_Linguistic_Phonetics_.
 Chicago: U Chicago P.

Ladefoged, Peter and Ian Maddieson. 1995. _Sounds_of_the_World's_Languages_.
 Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.

Laver, John. 1994. _Principles_of_Phonetics_. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.

Mateus, Maria H. M. 1975. _Aspectos_da_fonologia_portuguesa_. Lisboa:
 Centro de Estudos Filologicos.

Merrifield, William. 1963. "Palantla Chinantec syllable types."
 _Anthropological_Linguistics_ 5, no.5:1-16.

Thanks again are due to those who responded. I never dreamed
my request would receive such a prompt and efficient response.

Kudos are also directed towards the LINGUIST editors who make
this procedure possible.

Sincerely
Michael Reese
mtreeseccwf.cc.utexas.edu