Newsgroups: sci.lang
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!das-news2.harvard.edu!news2.near.net!news.mathworks.com!news.duke.edu!news-feed-1.peachnet.edu!gatech!howland.reston.ans.net!EU.net!sun4nl!mcv
From: mcv@inter.NL.net (Miguel Carrasquer)
Subject: Re: H and digraphs thereof
Message-ID: <Cy5I2J.JDt@inter.NL.net>
Organization: NLnet
References: <CxtB2r.6C6@inter.NL.net) <37uqhc$f2n@gordon.enea.se> <CxurM8.E3w@inter.NL.net> <38egcv$537@gordon.enea.se>
Date: Mon, 24 Oct 1994 00:15:54 GMT
Lines: 38

In article <38egcv$537@gordon.enea.se>,
Erland Sommarskog <sommar@enea.se> wrote:
>
>Yes, it seems so. I picked up a Galician grammar in Vigo, and the
>authors claim that there are four nasal phonemes in Galician /m/,
>/n/, /n/ and /N/. They also give the minimal trio of "cuna",
>"cun~a" and "cunha" - except that it is not really minimal trio
>as "cunha" is pronounced [kuNA~]. (Where [A] stands for something
>the authors calls "vocal central abertura maxima velarizada".)
>I guess this opens for some semantic discussions whether /N/
>qualifies as phoneme.
>
>When I look through the small Galician text mass I have at hand,
>I can actually find only one morpheme with "nh", namely "unha",
>the feminine indefinite article (which interesting enough is "uma"
>in Portoguese). "Cunha" is just "con" + "unha".
>
>[N] occurs in a few more places, but seems to be allophone with
>[n] here.
>
>Now, I am sure that there is someone in the group who is more 
>authorative on Galician than me.
>

Not me, but the case of 'unha' = Port. `uma' is interesting.
The word of course derives from "una", with characteristic
loss of intervocalic -n-, giving *u~a.  In many Portuguese
words, nasalization is also lost (e.g. "lua" `moon'), but
here (maybe because of masc. "um" [u~]), it develops into
[u~m@].  It seems Galician has [N] as a "nasal glide", then.
But I doubt the wisdom of spelling it "nh", which seems almost
like a deliberate attempt to make the spelling incompatible 
with Portuguese (Why not "ng(u)"?).

-- 
Miguel Carrasquer         ____________________  ~~~
Amsterdam                [                  ||]~  
mcv@inter.NL.net         ce .sig n'est pas une .cig 
