Velar nasal
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| IPA – number | 119 |
| IPA – text | ŋ |
| IPA – image | 
|
| Entity | ŋ |
| X-SAMPA | N |
| Kirshenbaum | N |
| Sound sample | |
|---|---|
The velar nasal is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ŋ, and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is N.
Contents |
[edit] Features
Features of the velar nasal:
- Its manner of articulation is stop, which means it is produced by obstructing airflow in the vocal tract.
- Its place of articulation is velar which means it is articulated with the back part of the tongue (the dorsum) against the soft palate (the velum).
- Its phonation type is voiced, which means the vocal cords are vibrating during the articulation.
- It is a nasal consonant, which means air is allowed to escape through the nose.
- It is a central consonant, which means it is produced by allowing the airstream to flow over the middle of the tongue, rather than the sides.
- The airstream mechanism is pulmonic egressive, which means it is articulated by pushing air out of the lungs and through the vocal tract, rather than from the glottis or the mouth.
The IPA symbol is a lowercase letter n with a leftward tail protruding from the bottom of the right stem of the letter. Compare n and ŋ. Both the symbol and the sound are commonly called as "eng" or "engma" and sometimes in reference to Greek, "agma". The symbol ŋ should not be confused with ɳ, the symbol for the retroflex nasal, which has a rightward-pointing hook extending from the bottom of the right stem or with ɲ, the symbol for the palatal nasal, which has a leftward-pointing hook extending from the bottom of the left stem.
[edit] Varieties of [ŋ]
| IPA | Description |
|---|---|
| ŋ | plain ŋ |
| ŋ̊ | voiceless ŋ |
| ŋ̍ | syllabic ŋ |
| ŋ̈ | breathy voiced ŋ |
| ŋ̃ | creaky voiced ŋ |
[edit] In English
In English, the velar nasal can occur in two positions:
- At the end of a word (or morpheme), where it's written as <ng>.
- Example: sing [sɪŋ] (/sɪŋ/)
- Before a velar stop (/k/ or /g/), where it occurs as an allophone of /n/ (or the archiphoneme /N/) and written as <n>.
- Examples: bank [bæŋk] (/bænk/); finger [fɪŋgə(ɹ)] (/fɪngr/)
[edit] In other languages
The [ŋ] sound is a fairly common sound cross-linguistically. It is unusual in that in many languages it is only permitted in postvocalic positions (after vowels), like in English, other European languages generally, Mandarin Chinese, and Korean. However, in other languages it is permitted at the beginnings of syllables and so may occur word-initially, as can be seen in the name of the language Ngaju Dayak. In Cantonese Chinese, not only is it permitted at the beginning of syllables, but it can be a standalone syllable itself. For instance, the surname Ng (sometimes transliterated as Eng) is a common Cantonese surname and is pronounced [ŋ̩] (呉).
In Ancient Greek, before /k/ and /ɡ/, it was written with a gamma γ (which was otherwise used for /ɡ/) and it was probably an allophone of /n/, as in Italian, Spanish and Modern Greek. In modern Germanic languages, it is a separate phoneme — originally, it was only an allophone in Germanic, too. Nevertheless, there is a Runic letter that represents [ŋ]. In his book Ancient Scripts And Phonological Knowledge, Gary D. Miller argues that the Runic ŋ-letter is composed of two gammas. Two gammas didn't represent [ŋ] in Greek, but [ŋɡ], but it's plausible that this was the source since Greek didn't have a separate letter for simple [ŋ]. In Latin, [ŋ] was represented by n before c, g; and by g before n; thus, agnus was pronounced /aŋnus/.
In Northern Sami, [ŋ] is represented by the letter ŋ.
In Finnish, 'nk' represents [ŋk] while 'ng' represents the geminated [ŋŋ]. There is no /ɡ/ in 'ng'. For example, lanka [laŋka] vs. langan [laŋŋan] vs. lannan [lannan].
In Norwegian, 'nk' represents [ŋk] while 'ng' (mostly) represents [ŋ] (like in lang [laŋ] 'long'). But in some words 'ng' represents [ŋg] (like in tango [taŋgu] 'tango').
In Galician [ŋ] is represented by the digraph nh.
In Slavic languages it is occasionally an allophone of /n/ before /k/ and /ɡ/ but this isn't always the case. Examples: banka [baŋka] (or [banka]), bingo [biŋɡo] (or [binɡo]).
In Seri it is an allophone of the phoneme /m/ (and not of /n/) in unstressed syllables either before velar consonants or (optionally) phrase-finally. Thus comcaac /komkaak/ 'Seri people' is pronounced [koŋ'kaak]. A uvular nasal similarly occurs before uvular consonants.
[edit] See also
| Consonants (List, table) | See also: IPA, Vowels | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| This page contains phonetic information in IPA, which may not display correctly in some browsers. [Help] Where symbols appear in pairs, the one to the right represents a voiced consonant. Shaded areas denote pulmonic articulations judged impossible. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
de:Stimmhafter velarer Nasal fr:Consonne occlusive nasale vélaire voisée ja:軟口蓋鼻音 ro:Consoană nazală velară fi:Velaarinen nasaali sv:Velar nasal
