Talk:Nasal palatal approximant

The pronunciation of Portuguese nh is peculiar to the language. It is like the y in English yes, but nasalized. It is not identical to Spanish ñ or French and Italian gn, although these may serve as approximations. The difference is that to pronounce Spanish ñ or French and Italian gn the tongue comes into contact with the palate, whereas for Portuguese nh it only approaches it, so that result it is a nasalized glide, that is, a semivowel, not a true consonant.

(Mário A. Perini, MODERN PORTUGUESE A Reference Grammar, Yale University Press, 2002) ---

‘’Vale ressaltar que na maioria dos dialetos do português brasileiro o som correspondente ao dígrafo ‘’nh’’ é um segmento vocálico nasalizado, ou seja [ỹ]’’ /(We must emphasize that in most dialects of Brazilian Portuguese the sound corresponding to the digraph ‘’nh’’ is a nasalized vocalic segment, that is [ỹ] /

(Thaïs Cristófaro Silva, FONÉTICA E FONOLOGIA DO PORTUGUÊS, Editora Contexto, São Paulo, 2001) --— Preceding unsigned comment added by Linda Martens (talk • contribs)

I think /j̃/ does exist in Arabic (or at least it does in recitations of the Qur'an) whenever there is a nūn sakinah before a yā’ layyinah. /j̃/ can be described as an allophone of /nj/ For example, the sentence «أَنْ يَكْتُبَ» is commonly pronounced like /ʔaj̃j̃aktub/ instead of /ʔanːjaktub/ or /ʔanjaktub/

One curious exception though is in the word «دُنْيَا» which isn't pronounced /duj̃j̃a/, it's pronounced /dunja/. Jafar20950 (talk) 10:19, 6 June 2022 (UTC)Reply