Manjari Ohala

THE PHONETICS OF NASAL PHONOLOGY: THEOREMS AND DATA

Publisher Summary Physiologically a nasal speech sound is quite simple: it just involves lowering of the soft palate to a degree sufficient to couple the oral and nasal cavities acoustically. With a concomitant oral closure, a nasal consonant is produced; without it, a nasal vowel. This chapter discusses the extent to which sound patterns in language can be derived, such as theorems from first principles, the latter being facts that are empirically verifiable and pertinent as well to domains other than speech. The function of the speech mechanism may be considered the conversion of static or slowly varying air pressure into the rapid air pressure variations that are called sound. This task is accomplished by what is in effect an interconnected series of chambers whose volumes, and thus, also air pressures, may be varied by piston-like mechanisms and whose input and output of air flow are regulated by various valves.

Nasal Epenthesis in Hindi

Modern Hindi words such as [dat] ‘tooth’ and [t ∫and] ‘moon’ had similar phonetic structure in Middle Indo-Aryan, with conventional transliterations of danta and canda, respectively. The development of the long nasal vowel is usually correlated with loss of the nasal consonant. If so, why does one form still contain a nasal consonant? We argue that a sequence of nasalized vowel + voiced stop (but not voiceless stop) can, for phonetic reasons, engender an epenthetic nasal, and we demonstrate that the same process can be found (nondistinctively) in present-day Hindi and French in the junction between a word-final nasal vowel and a following word-initital voiced stop. A nondistinctive epenthetic nasal can become a ‘full’ or ‘lexical’ nasal when listeners reinterpret this transitional event as purposeful or intended.

Phonological areal features of some Indo-Aryan languages

Abstract This paper examines some of the areal phonological features characterizing India as a ‘linguistic area’. The focus is on those features which are of particular interest to phoneticians and phonologists in their search for phonetic explanations for sound patterns— both synchronic and diachronic. Thus, in particular, the following features are covered: retroflexion, aspiration, stress, nasalization and the development of implosives in Sindhi.

Acoustic and aerodynamic correlates of Hindi stops

In order to find out how the four Hindi stop types, p, ph, b, bh, are produced, we obtained the following data from native speakers: averaged fundamental frequency (FO) contours (on either side of the stops), oral air flow, and lung volume (via a plethysmograph) during the production of the stops in a sentence frame. The results include the following: (1) although the breathy‐voiced stops lower FO a great deal on the vowels following them, there is no consistent effect on FO by the other stop types, assuming the comparison of the various FO contours is done with respect to consonant onset, (2) the plethysmographic data reveal that short‐term variations in lung volume are purely a passive reaction to the rate of air flow out of the lungs—in other words, in contrast to previous claims, there is no active participation of the pulmonic system in the production of aspirated stops. [Supported by NSF.]