Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 17.djvu/171

159 N N denotes the dental nasal in all the languages in which our alphabet is used. But the sound which we call the dental nasal varies slightly in different languages accord ing to the position of the point of the tongue. This may be pressed against the back of the teeth ; and then we have a true " dental " sound. But the point of the tongue may also be placed not against the teeth but against the front part of the palate immediately behind the gums ; and it is in this way that our English dentals are formed. But this same letter N, either alone or together with another letter, or distinguished by some diacritical mark, can be used for a much wider range of nasal sounds. It has been already pointed out (see letter M) that there are in every language as many nasals as there are clearly distinguished classes of sound produced at different parts of the mouth, e.g., guttural or back-palatal, front-palatal, dental, labial, and others less easily apprehended. Each of these classes will have its nasal, which will vary from the sonant of the class only by the different position of the uvula: for the sonant (as, for example, d) the uvula is pressed up so as to cover the passage through the pharynx into the nostrils, and the voice therefore escapes wholly through the mouth ; for the nasal (as for n) the uvula hangs down, so that the voice passes partly behind it through the nose, partly through the mouth ; in all other respects the position of the vocal organs for d and for n is just the same, and the material of the sound is the same, i.e., breath made sonant by the vibration of the glottis. In an im proved alphabet, therefore, we ought in each language to have several symbols for the nasals, as in Sanskrit, which had five different symbols. But no European language has more than two simple symbols ; and, of these two, m is confined to one class, viz., the labial; n, simple or modified, denotes the other sounds, and therefore often differs in different languages, and sometimes in the same language. It may also be employed to denote a wholly different class of sounds, as the nasalized vowels of the French, which will be described below. The guttural nasal is heard in "anger," "finger," " hunger"; it is easy to note the difference of the n as heard in these words, and in " an," " fin," &c. In English, when the sound occurs at the end of a word, it is represented by ng, as " hang," " sing," &c., sometimes also when medial, as in the derivatives "hanger," "singer." It would be convenient if, as has often been proposed, the superfluous symbol q were employed for this nasal. The sound is heard in German as well as in English; but in French it is unknown. On the other hand, the front palatal nasal is heard in the French "Boulogne," Italian "Campagna," Spanish " ano," " otono," &c., the diacritical mark being always used in Spanish; it is not known with us; but its position in the mouth is shown by that of the correspond ing closed consonants, English ch andy, and of the frica tive consonant of the same class, which is y. The peculiar class of sounds called "cerebral" in Sanskrit was formed by turning the point of the tongue a little backward ! toward the top of the palate ; of these the nasal was by ; far the most frequent. Our English " dental " lies between ( the cerebral and the true "dental," for which (as in India) j the tongue actually touches the teeth, our dental being of the kind already mentioned, in which the tongue does not come farther forward than the front palate. From what has been said, it will appear that the nasals might be called nasalized consonants. The guttural nasal is g nasalized ; the dental nasal is d nasalized : part of the voice in each case is diverted from the mouth through the nostrils, and some nasal sound is already heard while the passage through the mouth is closed by the tongue, or by the lips for the production of the labial nasal ; but the complete nasal sound is not heard till the block of the tongue or of the lips is removed, exactly as in the produc tion of g, or J, or b. But it is possible to nasalize vowels as well as to nasalize consonants. The position of the uvula can be altered when the mouth is set for sounding the vowel a just as well as when it is set for the sound of g ; and then instead of the pure a-sound we get one of a nasal quality; as instead of the final consonant sound of "hag" we get the nasalized guttural in "hang." These nasalized vowels are unknown to us in England; and this is the reason why we find so much difficulty in pronouncing them in French. An Englishman learning French will always begin by pronouncing " en " as if it were " eng," and "on" as if it were "ong." But the French "en" is not the vowel e plus the guttural nasal n; it is the vowel e nasalized. It is probable, though not provable, that -nasal vowels were used in Latin. The evidence lies in the varying spelling of words like "censor" and "cesor," "consul" and "cosol," &c. ; neither is right, but each seems to be an attempt to avoid an error ; " censor " is a protest against sounding a nasal e as pure e ; and " cesor " against sound ing it as e + n. Again, the Latin has " con-ficere," but " com-ponere " ; now / and p are both labials, and there fore we should expect the same treatment of the final n in " con " before each ; probably the n marked a nasal vowel (used before a fricative consonant), whereas the m was a true nasal consonant before the closed consonant p. Cicero s doctrine (Orat. 159) that the vowel i is naturally long in " in-sanus," " in-felix, " tc., but short in " in-doctus," points to the same conclusion that the n before s and / marked a long nasalized vowel. Lastly, we have the spelling of Greek words like Oycravpos as " thensaurus " in Latin ; it is improbable that the n here was the full consonant. It is not unlikely that the appearance and non-appear ance of the nasal in the dialects of the same language indicates an original nasalized vowel which has in one case disappeared, in the other has passed into a vowel followed by a nasal. Thus in German we find " sanft " correspond ing to English " soft," " gans " to "goose," &c. But the vowel has been modified in such cases in compensation for the loss of its original nasal quality. The phenomenon of the so-called " parasitic " nasal arises from careless pronunciation ; before sounding a closed consonant (like g} the uvula is not sufficiently raised, and so a nasal of the same class is heard before the g, as in "nightingale" (compare German "nachtigal"). Yet more common is the development by the nasal itself of a parasitic closed consonant of its own class ; many such have long been firmly established, as in the words " sound " (Middle English "soun," like French "son," Latin "sonu-s"), "thunder" (A.S. " thunor "), still rightly pro nounced in the north of England as "thunner"; but "gownd," "singling," though familiar enough, have not yet made their way into polite speech. These parasitic sounds are also due to careless pronunciation ; if the passage through the nostrils be not kept open till the articulating organs of the mouth have separated, the nasal quality at the end of the sound is lost, and the closed con sonant must follow. There has been an odd loss of n at the beginning of several English words which has often