[ɴ]→[õ]Certainty: 4/5Commonality: 3/5
Uvular nasal to Nasalized close-mid back rounded vowel
The uvular nasal, a phonetically complex and cross-linguistically rare consonant, can undergo a process of lenition where its oral occlusion is lost, leading to its vocalization into a nasalized vowel. This transformation is often observed as an allophonic variation in languages where the uvular nasal is not a stable phoneme.
Phonetic Effects
Lenition, Vocalization, Debuccalization, Nasalization
Language Examples
/N/→[õ]— The Japanese moraic nasal /N/, which can be realized as a uvular nasal [ɴ] in certain contexts, can vocalize to a nasalized vowel, particularly in utterance-final position or before other vowels, approximants, or voiceless fricatives. The specific quality of the nasalized vowel depends on the surrounding vowels; after a back vowel like /o/, it can be realized as a nasalized close-mid back rounded vowel [õ].
Related Transformations
More Nasalization Shifts
Sources & References
- Trigo, R. L. (1988). The phonological derivation and behavior of nasal glides. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Doctoral dissertation).
- Kawahara, S., Sato, S. T., & Maekawa, K. (2021). Production of the utterance-final moraic nasal in Japanese: A real-time MRI study. Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 51(1), 1-27.
Spotted a mistake or have a better example?
EchoDrift is community-driven. You can suggest a change directly through GitHub.
Propose an Edit on GitHub