English Phonology Home Paper
We have learnt that nasals are sounds which are pronounced by the air flowing out of the nasal cavity instead of the oral. The reason for this is that "a total closure is made within the mouth" 1, but "the soft palate is in lowered position, allowing an escape of air into the nasal cavity (
) the air-stream may escape freely through the nose"2. In English Received Pronounciation (RP), three nasals are realised: the bilabial nasal /m/, the alveolar /n/ and the velar nasal /N/.
(1)In some languages, e.g. Hungarian, /N/ is an allophone, but the realisation of this sound is different in English: it is a phoneme in RP, however, as Nádasdy points out in Background to English Pronounciation, "the velar nasal /N/ in ink, hunger, is the same as in Hungarian tank, tenger."3 The evidence for the different realisations of the sound /N/, so that it is a phoneme in English, but "only" an allophone in Hungarian is that there are minimal pairs produced by /N/ in RP, e.g.: /sIn/ -/sIN/ or /kIn/ - /kIN/, but it does not happen in Hungarian.
Another evidence is that the appearance if /N/ in RP is predictable, i.e. considering the environment, we can easily predict whether it is an /n/ or an /N/ which is pronounced. If we pronounce and transcribe words like finger, ink, anger, ankle, donkey, angle,jungle, uncle, hunger,anxious, anchor, we realise that all of them contain the phoneme /N/ and none of them contain /n/. A rule can be formed that the letter "n" is pronounced /N/ whenever it is followed by a velar plosive, i.e. /k/, /g/, and it may never appeare word initially. As Nádasdy writes in Background to English Pronounciation: "every English velar nasal should be transcribed as /N/, even if it stands before /k/ or /g/, where its appearance
is entirely predictable: ink /iNk/, or hunger /'hĂNg«/ "4. Gussman sums up the discussions in Phonology, Domains and phonological regularities chapter: "the velar nasal in RP is fundamentally...
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