ADS-L Digest - 13 Nov 2001 to 14 Nov 2001 (#2001-319)

[Dennis R. Preston]

Oooops! You mean the sound is conditioned by entering the nasal
passage(s), but the sound don't come out your nose. You can hold your
nose tightly shut and still produce nasal sounds.

dInIs



>"Billionbridges.com" <translation at BILLIONBRIDGES.COM> says:
>
>>>>>>
>Nevertheless, we Canadians and many Brits as well
>cringe at the nasal "r" at the end of the American
>"foyer".  And I'd argue that the long "a" vowel sound
>at the end of the US "f at lay" for filet puts it equally
>as distant from the French as the British Fill at t,--
>even though the Brits pronounce the "t" at the end,
>at least they get that last vowel sound right.
>
>Don
><<<<<
>
>I say: Huh??? "Nasal r"? "Last vowel sound"?
>
>American /r/ is not particularly nasal, and I don't hear anything nasal
>about it in "foyer" or know any reason for it to be so in any American
>dialect. In phonetics and phonology, "nasal" refers to sounds in which the
>breath passes out through the nose rather than the mouth. "Nasal 'r'" could
>only be short for "nasalIZED 'r'", with partial nasal outflow. You may not
>like the sound of American vowels, which are often strongly nasalized, and
>you may not like American final /r/, and they may even have some acoustic
>characteristics in common, but nasality is unlikely to be one of them.
>
>The French word "filet" has a low-mid front unrounded vowel, [E] (IPA
>epsilon), in the second syllable, unblocked by any final consonant. IMHO,
>British [@t] (@ = schwa) is in no way closer to that than American [e_I] or
>[E_I]. -- Or (sudden afterthought) did you mean the FIRST vowel? On that
>one I'd agree: British stressed ['I] is closer to French [i] than American
>[@], backed and lowered from [I] by unstressed position and the velarized
>/l/.
>
>                   Mark A. Mandel : Senior Linguist
>  Dragon Systems, a Lernout & Hauspie company : speech recognition
>  320 Nevada St., Newton, MA 02460, USA : http://www.dragonsys.com

--
Dennis R. Preston
Department of Linguistics and Languages
Michigan State University
East Lansing MI 48824-1027 USA
preston at pilot.msu.edu
Office: (517)353-0740
Fax: (517)432-2736