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From: rickw@eskimo.com (Richard Wojcik)
Subject: Re: Phonemic nazal vowel in English
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Date: Sun, 26 Mar 1995 16:04:39 GMT
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In article <3l34jv$qbo@mother.usf.edu>,
Timothy Miller <millert@grad.csee.usf.edu> wrote:
>Some time back, something occurred to me, but I'm only now getting around 
>to mentioning it.
>
>The expressions (spelled as French because I don't know how to represent 
>it in English) "un-un" and "unhun", for "no" and "yes" respectively 
>(unless you're French, in which case they both mean "oui") seem to be  
>instances of phonemic nazal vowels in English.
>
>Are there anyother such instances, aside from borrowings, of this kind of 
>thing in Engligh?

These expressions are not really linguistic, but paralinguistic.  They do
have very interesting properties, though.  First of all, they contrast a
glottal stop--another nonphoneme--with the [h] sound.  Phonetically, one
could render the positive as [?NhN] and the negative as [?N?N], where N
stands for any nasal syllabic--nasalized schwa, bilabial, alveolar, velar.
They violate standard English phonology in that they use contrastive
glottal stops and stressed syllabic nasal consonants or vowels.  The nasal
component is highly variable, but it must be nasal.  That seems to be the
only hard requirement.  If these phonetic components were really
"phonemic", then you would be able to use them freely to formulate new
words.  Try making up a new word pronounced, say, [bM?M], and getting other
English speakers to use it.  Should be fun.  ;-)
-- 
Rick Wojcik  rickw@eskimo.com     Seattle (for locals: Bellevue), WA
             http://www.eskimo.com/~rickw/
