Voiceless Nasal Phonemes in Icelandic

Abstract

Icelandic has a number of 'surface minimal pairs' between voiced and voiceless nasals. Facts and arguments are presented that speak for the phonemic status of these sounds, in contrast to the widespread view that voiceless nasals in Icelandic are derived. It is shown, among else, that stops after voiced and voiceless nasals are phonetically identical. Due to this fact it is not possible on synchronic grounds to ascribe the distinction between voiced and voiceless nasals to a distinction among the following stops, unless phonological abstractness is used as an analytical tool. The rarely mentioned case of single word-initial voiced versus voiceless nasals (where no subsequent stop occurs) would require an even greater commitment to phonological abstractness if the derived status of voiceless nasals were maintained. Implications for linguistic phonetics and the IPA are discussed.

What it means to be phonetic or phonological: the case of Romanian devoiced nasals

“…also Maddieson 1984b). The same has been shown for Icelandic voiceless nasals (Jessen & Pétursson 1998). Unlike Burmese and Icelandic, Angamese has distinctive voiceless nasals without any final voiced part (Bhaskararao & Ladefoged 1991, Blankenship et al 1993, Ladefoged & Maddieson 1996, and this literature states that they are entirely voiceless with an aspirated release.…”

“…The past literature on phonemically voiceless nasals has documented partially voiced nasals in Burmese and Icelandic, with the voicing at the end of the nasal, and nasals in Angamese that are either entirely voiceless or that begin with a small amount of voicing (Dantsuji 1986, Bhaskararao & Ladefoged 1991, Blankenship et al 1993, Ladefoged & Maddieson 1996, Jessen & Pétursson 1998). Romanian, however, appears to include both completely and partially devoiced nasals in the same language, at least in the /sm/ cluster.…”

“…Voiceless nasals, at least those that contrast with voiced nasals, are cross-linguistically rare (Maddieson 1984a, Ohala & Ohala 1993, Ladefoged & Maddieson 1996, Jessen & Pétursson 1998). A search of the UPSID database shows 24 of 317 languages as having distinctive voiceless nasals (Botma 2004).…”

Voiceless nasals in the Ikema dialect of Miyako Ryukyuan

“…Unlike the oral cavity, the nasal cavity is lined with a dynamic layer of mucus which dampens acoustic signals, and thus may not enable productions with high enough amplitude for voiceless nasal place of articulation perception. Fully voiceless nasals have been described in languages such as Icelandic; however it is unclear whether these nasals are phonemic or allophones of voiced nasals (Jessen & Pétursson 1998, Hoole & Bombien 2010). Additionally, in southern dialects the voiceless nasal seems to be neessarily followed by a homorganic voiceless stop consonant, which may be providing much of the place cue for listeners (Jessen & Pétursson 1998).…”

“…Voiceless nasals are typologically rare phones employed contrastively in a handful of the world's languages (Ladefoged & Maddieson 2004). Acoustic characteristics of voiceless nasals have been analyzed in typologically diverse languages such as Burmese (Dantsuji 1986), Angami (Bhaskararao & Ladefoged 1991), Icelandic (Jessen & Pétursson 1998), and Romanian (Tucker & Warner 2010). One dialect of the under-documented language Miyako Ryukyuan, Ikema, has been reported to contain phonemic voiceless nasals, distinguishing it from other Ryukyuan languages and dialects of Miyako (Hayashi 2013).…”