Nasalization in Galician and Portuguese
Keywords:
nasalization, velar coarticulation, velar nasal, Galician, PortugueseAbstract
Galician and Portuguese shared part of their history in which nasal evolution played an important role. Contemporary Galician shows no contrastive nasality (nasal vs oral vowels), whereas Portuguese does. In this paper I show that the description of the velar coarticulation (or nasalization) of vowels in contact with nasal sonorants is relevant for descriptive purposes both in Galician and in Portuguese. Moreover this description provides some insights into phonetic questions of theoretical interest.
The recording of the oral and nasal sound pressure in separate channels makes it possible to accurately identify the timing of the nasalization of vowels. The study of anticipatory nasalization helps us to understand one of the most debated and elusive issues of Galician phonetics and phonology: the syllabic affiliation of the intervocalic velar nasal [N] in words like unha ‘one (fem.)’, algunha ‘some (fem.)’, etc. The experimental data show that the velar nasal occupies the coda position of the first syllable, and this fact has deep phonological implications.
Portuguese is described as a language with (surface) contrastive nasal vowels in forms such as manta ["m)t] ‘blanket’ / mata ["mat] ’(s)he kills’, pinto ["pü)tu] 'paint' / pito ["pitu] 'chick'. The stressed vowel in words like manta shows nasalization through most of its duration and is followed by a purely nasal segment, confirming the results obtained in previous works. Given that at least some Standard Portuguese speakers show a strong tendency to nasalize vowels after nasal consonants (carryover nasalization), the stressed vowel of words like mata could be also fully nasalized. This fact opens interesting hypotheses about the phonetic nature of the oral / nasal contrast in Portuguese vowels, as well as about the perception of nasality.
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