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Nasal vowels as two segments: Evidence from borrowings

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 February 2026

Carole Paradis and
Jean-François Prunet
Carole Paradis*
Affiliation:
Université Laval
Jean-François Prunet
Affiliation:
Université du Québec à Montréal
*
Paradis, Département de langues, linguistique et traduction, Université Laval, Québec, Qué. G1K 7P4, Canada, [carole.paradis@lli.ulaval.ca]
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Abstract

We attempt to demonstrate that the substitution of a foreign segment in the borrowings of our database, which includes 14,350 segmental malformations from French and English loanwords in eight distinct languages, involves its replacement by a single native segment. This tendency is so strong in our database as to be virtually exceptionless, except where nasal vowels are concerned. These vowels are systematically adapted as an oral vowel followed by a nasal consonant (VN), a process we call unpacking. We document this process and suggest that it results from the fact that contrastive nasal vowels are fundamentally biphonemic, that is they have two root nodes. The influence of orthography is refuted, and a number of apparent counterexamples where segments other than nasal vowels seem to unpack are reanalyzed in terms of independent native processes.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 76 , Issue 2 , June 2000, pp. 324 - 357
Copyright
Copyright © 2000 Linguistic Society of America

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