Prenasalized consonants are
phonetic
Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds, or in the case of sign languages, the equivalent aspects of sign. Linguists who specialize in studying the physical properties of speech are phoneticians. ...
sequences of a
nasal and an
obstruent (or occasionally a non-nasal
sonorant such as ) that behave
phonologically
Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages or dialects systematically organize their sounds or, for sign languages, their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a ...
like single consonants. The primary reason for considering them to be single consonants, rather than clusters as in English ''finger'' or ''member'', lies in their behaviour; however, there may also be phonetic correlates which distinguish prenasalized consonants from clusters. Because of the additional difficulty in both articulation and timing, prenasalized fricatives and sonorants are not as common as prenasalized stops or affricates, and the presence of the former implies the latter.
In most languages, when a prenasalized consonant is described as "voiceless", it is only the oral portion that is voiceless, and the nasal portion is modally voiced. Thus, a language may have "voiced" and "voiceless" . However, in some
Southern Min (including
Taiwanese
Taiwanese may refer to:
* Taiwanese language, another name for Taiwanese Hokkien
* Something from or related to Taiwan ( Formosa)
* Taiwanese aborigines, the indigenous people of Taiwan
* Han Taiwanese, the Han people of Taiwan
* Taiwanese people, ...
) dialects, voiced consonants are preceded by voiceless prenasalization: .
Yeyi Yeyi may refer to:
*Ye County, Henan, China, formerly known as Yeyi
* Yeyi people
*Yeyi language
Yeyi (autoethnonym ''Shiyɛyi'') is a Bantu languages, Bantu language spoken by many of the approximately 50,000 Yeyi people along the Okavango Rive ...
has prenasalized ejectives.
Adzera
Adzera (also spelled Atzera, Azera, Atsera, Acira) is an Austronesian language spoken by about 30,000 people in Morobe Province, Papua New Guinea.
Dialects
Holzknecht (1989) lists six Adzera dialects.
* ''Central'' dialect chain: 9,950 speake ...
has a .
Prenasalized stops may be distinguished from post-stopped nasals (orally released nasals), such as the of
Acehnese and similar sounds (including voiceless ) in many dialects of Chinese. (At least in the Chinese case, nasalization, in some dialects, continues in a reduced degree to the vowel, indicating that the consonant is partially
denasal
In phonetics, denasalization is the loss of nasal airflow in a nasal sound, such as a nasal consonant or a nasal vowel. That may be due to speech pathology but also occurs when the sinuses are blocked from a common cold, when it is called a nas ...
ized, rather than actually having an oral release.) No language is believed to contrast the two types of consonant, which are distinguished primarily by a difference in timing (a brief nasal followed by longer stop, as opposed to a longer nasal followed by brief stop).
Geographic distribution
Africa
The
Bantu languages are famous for their prenasalized stops (the "nt" in "Bantu" is an example), but similar sounds occur across Africa and around the world.
Ghana
Ghana (; tw, Gaana, ee, Gana), officially the Republic of Ghana, is a country in West Africa. It abuts the Gulf of Guinea and the Atlantic Ocean to the south, sharing borders with Ivory Coast in the west, Burkina Faso in the north, and To ...
's politician
Kwame Nkrumah had a prenasalized stop in his name, as does the capital of
Chad,
N'Djamena
N'Djamena ( ) is the capital and largest city of Chad. It is also a special statute region, divided into 10 districts or ''arrondissements''.
The city serves as the centre of economic activity in Chad. Meat, fish and cotton processing are the c ...
(African prenasalized stops are often written with
apostrophes in Latin script transcription although this may sometimes indicate
syllabic
Syllabic may refer to:
*Syllable, a unit of speech sound, considered the building block of words
**Syllabic consonant, a consonant that forms the nucleus of a syllable
*Syllabary, writing system using symbols for syllables
*Abugida, writing system ...
nasals instead). The sound can also be found in approximately 90 languages in Africa.
East Asia
In
Southern Min languages, such as
Teochew, prenasalized stops are also found. The prenasalized stops in the southern Min languages evolved from the nasals of
Middle Chinese
Middle Chinese (formerly known as Ancient Chinese) or the Qieyun system (QYS) is the historical variety of Chinese recorded in the '' Qieyun'', a rime dictionary first published in 601 and followed by several revised and expanded editions. The ...
and thus are historically different from the voiced obstruents found in
Wu and
Xiang languages.
Prenasalized consonants are widely utilized in the
Loloish languages
The Loloish languages, also known as Yi in China and occasionally Ngwi or Nisoic, are a family of fifty to a hundred Sino-Tibetan languages spoken primarily in the Yunnan province of China. They are most closely related to Burmese and its rel ...
of the
Lolo–Burmese family, such as
Yi and
Naxi. The following table illustrates the prenasalized consonants in northern Yi.
The prenasalized stops also occur in several branches of the
Hmong–Mien language family of Southern China and Southeast Asia.
In dialects of northern
Japan, standard voiced stops are prenasalized, and voiceless stops are voiced. For example, "strawberry" is in most of the south, but in much of the north. Prenasalized stops are also reconstructed for
Old Japanese
is the oldest attested stage of the Japanese language, recorded in documents from the Nara period (8th century). It became Early Middle Japanese in the succeeding Heian period, but the precise delimitation of the stages is controversial.
Old Jap ...
.
Europe
In
Greek
Greek may refer to:
Greece
Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe:
*Greeks, an ethnic group.
*Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family.
**Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...
the orthographic sequences μπ, ντ γκ and γγ are often pronounced as prenasalized voiced stops , , and , respectively, especially in formal speech and among older speakers. Among younger speakers the prenasalization often disappears and in fast speech the voiced stop may be replaced by a fricative.
South America
The
Guaraní language
Guaraní (), specifically the primary variety known as Paraguayan Guarani ( "the people's language"), is a South American language that belongs to the Tupi–Guarani family of the Tupian languages. It is one of the official languages of ...
has a set of prenasalized stops which are alternate allophonically with simple nasal continuants; they appear only within a word, to the left of a stressed vowel that is oral.
South Asia
The
Indo-Aryan languages
The Indo-Aryan languages (or sometimes Indic languages) are a branch of the Indo-Iranian languages in the Indo-European languages, Indo-European language family. As of the early 21st century, they have more than 800 million speakers, primarily ...
Sinhala and
Dhivehi
Dhivehi, also spelled Divehi, may refer to:
*Dhivehi people, an ethnic group native to the historic region of the Maldive Islands.
*Dhivehi language, an Indo-Aryan language predominantly spoken by about 350,000 people in the Republic of Maldives
...
have prenasalized stops.
Sinhala script
The Sinhala script ( si, සිංහල අක්ෂර මාලාව, Siṁhala Akṣara Mālāva), also known as Sinhalese script, is a writing system used by the Sinhalese people and most Sri Lankans in Sri Lanka and elsewhere to write ...
has prenasalized versions of , /
ʥ/, , and .
Sri Lankan Malay has been in contact with Sinhala a long time and has also developed prenasalized stops. The spectrograms on the right show the word gaambar with a prenasalized stops and the word sambal with a sequence of nasal+voiced stop, yet not prenasalized. The difference in the length of the
part is clearly visible. The nasal in the prenasalized word is much shorter than the nasal in the other word.
This phonetic information is complemented by phonological evidence: The first vowel in gaambar is lengthened, which only happens in open syllables in Sri Lanka Malay. The
syllabification
Syllabification () or syllabication (), also known as hyphenation, is the separation of a word into syllables, whether spoken, written or signed.
Overview
The written separation into syllables is usually marked by a hyphen when using English or ...
of gaambar must be gaa.mbar then, and the syllabification of sambal sam.bal.
Oceania
An example of the unitary behavior of prenasalized stops is provided by
Fijian. In this language, as in many in
Melanesia
Melanesia (, ) is a subregion of Oceania in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. It extends from Indonesia's New Guinea in the west to Fiji in the east, and includes the Arafura Sea.
The region includes the four independent countries of Fiji, Va ...
, there is a series of
voiceless
In linguistics, voicelessness is the property of sounds being pronounced without the larynx vibrating. Phonologically, it is a type of phonation, which contrasts with other states of the larynx, but some object that the word phonation implies ...
stops, , and a series of prenasalized stops, , but there are no simple
voiced
Voice or voicing is a term used in phonetics and phonology to characterize speech sounds (usually consonants). Speech sounds can be described as either voiceless (otherwise known as ''unvoiced'') or voiced.
The term, however, is used to refer ...
stops, . In addition, Fijian allows prenasalized stops at the beginning of a word, but it does not allow other consonant sequences. Thus the prenasalized stops behave like ordinary consonants. In some Oceanic languages, prenasalisation of voiced consonants depends on the environment. For example, in
Raga, b and d are prenasalised when the preceding consonant is nasal (''noⁿda'' "ours"), but not elsewhere (''gida'' "us").
When
Tok Pisin
Tok Pisin (,Laurie Bauer, 2007, ''The Linguistics Student’s Handbook'', Edinburgh ; Tok Pisin ), often referred to by English speakers as "New Guinea Pidgin" or simply Pidgin, is a creole language spoken throughout Papua New Guinea. It is an ...
is spoken by people in
Papua New Guinea
Papua New Guinea (abbreviated PNG; , ; tpi, Papua Niugini; ho, Papua Niu Gini), officially the Independent State of Papua New Guinea ( tpi, Independen Stet bilong Papua Niugini; ho, Independen Stet bilong Papua Niu Gini), is a country i ...
who have similar phonologies in their languages, voiced consonants are prenasalized. For example, the preposition ''bilong'' (from English ''belong'') is pronounced by many
Melanesians
Melanesians are the predominant and indigenous inhabitants of Melanesia, in a wide area from Indonesia's New Guinea to as far East as the islands of Vanuatu and Fiji. Most speak either one of the many languages of the Austronesian language f ...
. The prenasalization behaves as a phonetic detail of voicing, rather than a separate segment.
Australia
Prenasalized stops are also found in Australia. The
Eastern Arrernte language has both prenasalized stops and
prestopped nasals, but does not have any other word-initial
consonant cluster
In linguistics, a consonant cluster, consonant sequence or consonant compound, is a group of consonants which have no intervening vowel. In English, for example, the groups and are consonant clusters in the word ''splits''. In the education fie ...
s. Compare "good", "make", "
coolamon".
Transcription
When unambiguous, prenasalized consonants may simply be transcribed etc. In the IPA, a tie bar may be used to specify that these are single segments: . Another common transcription practice is to make the nasal superscript: . An old convention of the IPA was to mark the nasal as 'short' until the short and the nonsyllabic signs diverged: .
[''Principles of the IPA'' (1947: 17–18)]
See also
*
Preploded nasal
*
List of Latin digraphs#M
References
Sources
*{{citation
, last=Silverman
, first=Daniel
, year=1995
, title=Optional, conditional, and obligatory prenasalization in Bafanji
, journal=Journal of West African Languages
, volume=25
, pages=57–62
Nasal consonants