Isaac Sechslingloff
Insegnante professionista
ñ and gn in English
English has this rare sound, not exclusive to loan words which I don't think anyone has truelly documented. This is the "ny" sound.
It is easiest to recognize this sound from the foreign letters ⟨ñ⟩ and ⟨gn⟩ as in Jalapeño (Spanish) and Lasagna (Italian).
Obviously both these words have been in the English language long enough so that they are probably no longer considered "loan words"... and prunounciation is in line with English phonology.
I wonder however what exactly is this sound?
Discluding bilingual communities that have the ability to prunounce words as in their original language, [nj] seems to be the culprit.
However.. In such words, is this really the prunounciation? or would it be [nʲ]?
Sure this sound might not look native to English but how easy is it to prunounce [n] and [j] in such positions independantly without merging them into a single phone? Palatization may occur in such positions.
The most significant example would be the, indesputibly English word "new", which I think is prunounced differently from both region to region and speaker to speaker.
[nu]
[nʲu]ᵖᵒˢˢⁱᵇˡʸ
[nju]
[niu]

I think, if speakers prunounce ⟨n⟩ palatized in this position than they may do the same for the foreign letters above.
But I still wonder what exactly this sound may be? [nj] or [nʲ]
Thoughts are welcome.
2 mar 2020 18:08
Commenti · 5
1
@Som (सोम) Wow, I did not know Sanskrit had such a diverse palate for phones.
3 marzo 2020
1
Sanskrit has three versions: ञ (ñ), ज्ञ (gñ) and न्य (ny). The last is a simple combination of n (न) and y (य). Knowing the sounds of Sanskrit is very useful to get the phonetics of most IE languages because one already knows how they are pronounced.
3 marzo 2020
1
I agree with Bill — English doesn’t have a palatal nasal phoneme, so the sound is usually pronounced as /nj/ in English — with the /n/ and /j/ in separate syllables (as in “canyon”). If they have to be in the same syllable, you might hear /ni/. That said, in rapid speech, English speakers do have a tendency to assimilate the nasal to the following consonant (or semiconsonant), so it may be realized as a palatal nasal. 

3 marzo 2020
Isaac, Sanskrit and all its child scripts are abugida alphasyllabary. There are 52 letters including vowels and consonants, not counting the vowel diacritics which can go with any consonant. If one includes those, it's 63 letters in the entire set, still not counting the very many possible consonant combos of up to five consonants in any sequence. Two examples are strya (स्त्र्य) and krng (कृङ).

Naturally, with that many letters a lot more sounds are represented. That's why knowing how to pronounce those is a very definite advantage when it comes to pronouncing sounds in other languages, because you already have most if not all those sounds.

Spanish was no problem at all, 100% of the sounds exist in Sanskrit already. For German, I had to work a bit on the Ü and Ö. Russian is by far the most difficult so far, in the Щ, Ж, Ы and the palatalized consonants with the soft sign (myagkiy znak, ь).
3 marzo 2020
The IPA symbol for how ñ is commonly pronounced in Spanish is [ɲ], which is identified as a palatal nasal.

The English "ny" sound (that is, [nj] or [nʲ]) typically starts with the tip of the flat tongue touching the alveolar ridge, then shifting the tongue's point of contact backward to "y" as we release to the following vowel..

The typical pronunciation of [ɲ] is different: one raises the middle part of the tongue and touches it against the palate (the roof of the mouth behind the alveolar ridge); the tip of the tongue does not participate in making the sound. This sound doesn't exist in the varieties of English I'm familiar with, so when we borrow words from other languages that have this sound we usually substitute  [nj] or [nʲ].
3 marzo 2020