Omaha nasal vowels

[Koontz John E]

On Thu, 24 Aug 2000, Catherine Rudin wrote:
> But I'm quite sure your explanation about "nasalized" vs. "nasal" won't work.

Where you might find secondarily nasalized vowels would be before a real m
or n (not a transition from a nasal vowel to stop), though I've not
noticed it in OP.  It does happen in Winnebago and Dakota, I believe.

In some cases a transitional nasal before a stop may be the realization of
nasality in a context, hence listening to C-VN-Stop sequences can be
helpful.  It might be possible to construct some by appending enclitic
definite articles?  What are the phonetics of niN=khe, for example?

I have encountered things like iNga in fast speech for egaN, where the
nasalization plopped down on an adjacent syllable, skipping through a
relatively untransparent obstruent.  Things like dh and w (and m and n)
are relatively more transparent to nasality in tyypical Siouan languages.

I've noticed that final aN# is usually [<schwa>], and that Dorsey often
records it simply as a.  Typical orthographic variants noted are gdheba(N)
and ... (blocking it at the moment), but you can hear this with other
words, e.g., gidhahaN (cf. wibdhahaN), umaNhaN, egaN, etc. LaFlesche
usually notes these as nasal, presumably because as a native speaker he
wasn't confused by the allophony. I've seen umoNha in local writing in
Macy.  Of course, this could be English spelling influence, too.

JEK