In The Name of Allah

Chapter 9
9.2.5 Clusters with nasals

Presenter Name: Masoud Dolatshahi

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 9.2.5 Clusters with nasals

• Nasal + plosive consonant which shares the same place of articulation :

• [mp nt nd ŋk ŋg] → as in ‘lamp’, ‘rant’, ‘land’, ‘lank’ and ‘finger’

• In these clusters, the oral closure is held and the velum is raised in order to produce
oral airflow. The three clusters with voiceless (-) plosives deserve some
comment. Recall that vowels are longer before voiced (+) plosives, and
before (-) plosives, many speakers produce creaky voice during the

vowel ↔ nasal + plosive clusters :,

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 If you look closely you will see that the nasal consonants have a much simpler waveform
pattern than the vowels. This is because the nasal articulations favour low frequency spectral
components and low frequency waves vary more slowly than high frequency waves.
You can readily see where the consonant ends and the vowel starts by looking for two changes.
The simplest change to see is the sudden increase in intensity that occurs as the oral cavity is
opened at the start of the vowel. The open oral cavity allows more power or intensity to be
transmitted from the larynx to the outside world. The other change that occurs is the change in
pattern from the simple nasal consonant pattern (dominated by low frequencies) to the more
complex vowel pattern (with a more even mixture of low and higher frequencies).

Another characteristic of this class of

speech sounds is the general lack of
aperiodicity, or aspiration, in the waveform
and the absence of the bursts characteristic
of the stops and affricates. If aperiodicity is
very evident in the waveform it is likely to
be characteristic of a pathological vocal
condition such as an excessively breathy
voice

The slight interruption in the waveform near

the beginning of the /n/ is probably due to a
slight creak in the voice. Slight and
occasional creakiness in the voice is perfectly
normal and only becomes pathological when
it occurs continuously or for an abnormally
large proportion of a person's speech.
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Comparing ‘lend’ and ‘lent’.

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In English, in that there is no word-final [-mb] cluster.
[-nd], on the other hand, is very common.

The velar cluster [-ŋg] is more problematic. There

are varieties of English where there is no final [ŋ], since it is
always pronounced as [ŋg].

/ˈsɪŋ.ər/ /ˈfɪŋ.ɡər/

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 Can you guess what word is this?

There is also a phonetic explanation for the

origin of the [ŋ/ŋg] variation. To exit a nasal,
the velum must be lowered, but the oral closure
must also be released. In this case, the velar release
is produced simply as a percussive, that is, it is a
transient noise that arises from the separation two
articulators. We will transcribe this as , using
superscript to represent its shortness and low
amplitude. But if it is preceded by more airflow, and
there is more pressure behind the closure, it is a short
step from to[-ŋg]
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 9.3 Nasalised vowels
9.3.1 The production and transcription of nasalised vowels

In cases where a nasal is syllable final, nasality

starts before oral closure, giving rise to a period of
oro-nasal airflow. The result of this is typically a
nasalised vowel, which can be transcribed as a
vowel symbol + the diacritic [˜], resulting in
transcriptions like [hæ˜ŋ] , ‘hang’ , [su˜:n]
, ‘soon’, and [mε˜n], ‘men’.

It is often said in fact that English does not ‘have’

nasalised vowels, because the vowels that we can
find with oro-nasalair flow are different from
languages which ‘do have’ nasalised vowels in two
respects.

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Oro-nasal

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9.3.2 Nasalised vowels in
conversational speech

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9.3.3 Nasalised vowels in the place of nasal consonants

vowel + nasal + voiceless plosive →

nasalised vowel + voiceless plosive

(nasal airflow occurs concurrently with the open

resonant articulation needed for the vowel)

This can be seen as a ‘natural’

process, in that it has a simple
phonetic explanation: the velum
lowers early, producing nasality +
vocalicity followed by nasality + a
stop articulation.

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 [-p’n] → [-p’m]

[-k’n] → [k’ŋ]
[-g’n] → [-g’ŋ]

Between the [t] and the [n], then, there is no intervening vocalic
portion. This is because by definition vowels have unimpeded airflow
through the vocal tract, but all through the sequence [t’n], the tongue
makes a complete closure against the alveolar ridge. For this reason, the
nasal in a sequence like [t’n] in words like ‘button’ is considered to be
syllabic.

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9.4 Syllabic nasals

Nasals can be syllabic in English. This means that they

occur in syllables without vowels in unstressed syllables.

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These cases are straightforwardly syllabic nasals, because the plosive
and nasal portions are homorganic: they share the same place of
articulation. Slightly more difficult is the case of e.g. fricative + nasal, as
in‘prison’, ‘reason’, ‘often’, ‘rhythm’, ‘oven’.
[prIzn] → [prIzə˜n]
/ˈɒf.ən/ /ˈɒf.tən/

/ˈʌv.ən/

In these cases, the two consonants do not necessarily share a place of

articulation. For them to be syllabic, the join between the fricative portion
and the nasal portion requires the oral closure for the nasal consonant to be
made without a more open gesture intervening between the gesture of close
approximation for the fricative and the oral closure needed for the nasal.
This is easy to achieve in words like ‘prison’, where the tongue needs merely
to be raised so as to make a complete closure against the alveolar ridge ,
giving [ən].

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nasal + plosive + nasal sequences
The distribution here is more difficult to explain: e.g. the name ‘Clinton’

syllabic nasals are often used as response tokens in conversation. Both

mono- and di-syllabic versions are found. Monosyllabic tokens are mostly
bilabial in English. In the disyllabic tokens, there is usually a glottal stop
or a portion of voicelessness or breathiness in the middle.

The place of articulation is usually bilabial, but

alveolar tokens are also found. These are one of
the few places in English where voiceless nasals
are found.

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They can also occur word medially too, especially when there is a
morpheme after the nasal. For example, the word ‘instances’, which has
a plural morpheme [-iz], can have a syllabic nasal:

One good place to observe this is in verbs formed from

adjectives with the suffix ‘-en’.

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Appendix
voiceless nasal

A slightly technical one this but the above is widely

asserted in some very serious contexts, perhaps by
people who know about phonetics but haven’t heard
much Welsh spoken; but it does not stand up to the
test of observation. The technical term ‘voiceless
nasal’ means simply that the sound emerges only
through the nose, not the mouth, and there is no
voice (the vocal cords are silent). Thus there would
have to be audible friction within the nose,
otherwise the result would be silence; it would be a
sort of exhaled sniff, like the quick snort down the
nose that you might make when something amuses
you so briefly you don’t bother to open your mouth
and laugh normally.
http://gwybodiadur.tripod.com/pronunc2.htm

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Cockney Analyze

http://www.yorku.ca/earmstro/speech/dialects/cockney/

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