Pronouncing -gn-

[Francoise Rosset]

>[mgla] it is stressed. While French and Italian no longer pronounce the
>[gn] combination, Russian has no problems.

I'm not sure that this can be said of French.
Certainly in front of an o, the phonemic sequence /gn/ is often (not always)
pronounced as such, as in "agnostique," "diagnostic," "gnome."
Sure, many are loan words, but so is much of any language.
For most other words, indeed, in French /gn/ is pronounced /ñ/
(palatalized n, n with a tilde).

>[The effects of native speaker
>consciousness are so pervasive, that my professor of linguistics/phonetics
>at a rather known American university some 25 year ago was telling us that
>the reduction of kn->n, pn ->n and gn->n is a linguistic universal,

Alina, do you mean that he was a native speaker of English and claimed the
reduction was true of English? and universalized it to other languages??
Because it isn't even true of English ...
(ignorant, magnanimous, igneous, acknowledge, etc.)

-FR


-- 

Francoise Rosset
Russian and Russian Studies
Interim Coordinator, Women's Studies
Wheaton College                         
Norton, Massachusetts 02766
        
phone: 	(508) 286-3696
fax #:   	(508) 286-3640
e-mail: FRosset at wheatonma.edu

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