Nasalization & Syllables

Nasalization

In linguistics, the imparting of a nasal quality to a sound, by opening up the nasal cavity as an extra resonator. All speech sounds are made with some configuration of the throat and oral cavity. The velum or soft palate acts as a drawbridge: it is normally retracted so as to close off the nasal cavity, but in nasal sounds it is lowered to allow air to resonate simultaneously through the nose.

Nasal consonants, like M and N and the Ng in sing and the Ñ in España, have a complete closure somewhere in the mouth, and air escapes only through the nose. They may also be called nasal stops.

Nasal vowels have both the oral and nasal cavities open. Nasalization is thus an extra articulation on an oral vowel, so nasal vowels may also be called nasalized vowels. This is nitpicking, but there are no solely nasal sounds. Also, configuration of the nasal cavity can't be altered (say by flaring the nostrils), or at least if this is physically possible it's never been reported as used in any language. The only parameter of nasality is whether the velum is open or shut.

Familiar languages with nasal vowels are French, Portuguese, Polish, and Hindi, and they are quite common world-wide, especially in West African languages. The four French vowels are illustrated by the phrase un bon vin blanc 'a good white wine'. All languages without exception have oral vowels, and usually have more oral than nasal.

The IPA phonetic symbol for nasalization is a tilde, thus [œ˜ bõ vE˜ blã]. (Only the Portuguese letters ã õ will show up correctly in HTML, so I've had to use a separate tilde: it should be over the vowel in all cases.) In Polish Lech Wałęsa = [lex va'we˜sa]

This is called primary nasalization when the language systematically uses nasal vowels as distinct phonemes: French [bõ] 'good' contrasts with [bo] 'beautiful'.

Most consonants can't be nasalized, or rather a nasalized B just is an M. They are the same orally, and instead of exploding abruptly as B does, the air is released continuously through the nose in M. But some consonants, those called sonorants, allow their normal oral articulation to have simultaneous nasality imposed over them. This set includes the laterals or L-like sounds, the rhotics or R-like sounds, and the approximants including W and Y. However, it is extremely rare to have nasalized sonorants as phonemes: usually they are the result of secondary nasalization.

Syllables and their parts

Words can be cut up into units called syllables. Humans seem to need syllables as a way of segmenting the stream of speech and giving it a rhythm of strong and weak beats, as we hear in music. Syllables don't serve any meaning-signalling function in language; they exist only to make speech easier for the brain to process. A word contains at least one syllable.

Most speakers of English have no trouble dividing a word up into its component syllables. Sometimes how a particular word is divided might vary from one individual to another, but a division is always easy and always possible. Here are some words divided into their component syllables (a period is used to mark the end of a syllable):

tomato = to.ma.to 
window = win.dow 
supercalifragilisticexpialidocious: su.per.ca.li.fra.gi.lis.ti.cex.pi.a.li.do.cious (some people might put some of the periods in different places in this word).

Syllables have internal structure: they can be divided into parts. The parts are onset and rhyme; within the rhyme we find the nucleus and coda. Not all syllables have all parts; the smallest possible syllable contains a nucleus only. A syllable may or may not have an onset and a coda.

Onset: the beginning sounds of the syllable; the ones preceding the nucleus. These are always consonants in English. The nucleus is a vowel in most cases, although the consonants [ r ], [ l ], [ m ], [ n ], and the velar nasal (the 'ng' sound) can also be the nucleus of a syllable. In the following words, the onset is in bold; the rest underlined.

read 
flop 
strap

If a word contains more than one syllable, each syllable will have the usual syllable parts:

win.dow 
to.ma.to 
pre.pos.te.rous 
fun.da.men.tal

Rhyme (or rime): the rest of the syllable, after the onset (the underlined portions of the words above). The rhyme can also be divided up:

Rhyme = nucleus + coda

The nucleus, as the term suggests, is the core or essential part of a syllable. A nucleus must be present in order for a syllable to be present. Syllable nuclei are most often highly 'sonorant' or resonant sounds, that can be relatively loud and carry a clear pitch level. In English and most other languages, most syllable nuclei are vowels. In English, in certain cases, the liquids [ l r ] and nasals [ m n ] and the velar nasal usually spelled 'ng' can also be syllable nuclei.