Monday, 1 June 2009
More about nasals, palatal and velar
As we saw yesterday, the palatal nasal ɲ is spelt as gn in French and Italian, as ñ in Spanish, and as nh in Portuguese. In Catalan and various African languages it is spelt ny. You might think that this would be straightforward for English speakers to process, but experience shows this isn’t necessarily the case.
Malawi (or Malaŵi, to be pedantic) used to be called Nyasaland, where Nyasa ɲasa, also spelt Nyassa or Niassa, means ‘lake’ in various Bantu languages in that part of Africa. What is now known as Lake Malawi was then called Lake Nyasa. But would the British say ˈnjæsə(lænd), as intended? No, they tended to go for naɪˈæsə. That is, they misinterpreted the letter y as standing for a vowel rather than a consonant. They did the same with the Tanzanian political leader Julius Nyerere. Compare today the name Myanmar (blog, 11 Oct 2007).
Quite apart from its use to spell a palatal nasal, the digraph gn is well known to be ambiguous in English. The g is silent (or ‘zeroed’, as Carney has it) in sign, reign, impugn, but not in signal, pregnant, pugnacious.
Most English-speaking classicists, I think, say ɡn in Latin words such as agnus, dignus, regnum. But choral singers and Catholics tend to be influenced by Italian and say nj. In classical Latin gn appears to have stood for neither ɡn nor ɲ, but rather for ŋn, thus aŋnus, diŋnus, reŋnũ (Allen, Vox Latina, CUP 1965). Allen says (p. 24) that according to C.D.Buck ŋn was changed in late classical times to ɡn as a spelling pronunciation. Subsequently the Romance languages changed ɡn to ɲ (etc).
A discussion of gn would not be complete without mention of the gnu, immortalized by Flanders and Swann with the jocular pronunciation ɡəˈnuː. (Watch and listen here.)
We don’t use the word gnu in ordinary conversation, since we call the animal in question a wildebeeste. According to the COD, gnu originated as a Bushman word nqu. As far as I know, modern Khoisan orthographies do not use the letter q; but if we interpret it following the spelling conventions of Zulu and Xhosa, that would mean a retroflex nasal click ŋ͡ǃ at the beginning.