I agree with everything Sumelic wrote.
Nasal vowels are rarely followed by a nasal consonant. The words
vînmes and
tînmes are indeed, to my knowledge, the only words when this happens for a coda nasal. I also think they're the only ones to have a circumflexed nasal vowel (the circumflex is only here because every other verb in the
passé simple has a circumflex).
Other examples of nasal vowel + nasal consonant include words with the
en- prefix, which is always nasalized:
ennuyer, enivrer, emmener /ɑ̃nɥije, ɑ̃nivre, ɑ̃məne/ (there are quite a lot of them, actually). There's also
néanmoins /neɑ̃mwɛ̃/. There are a few recent recent words where the
in- prefix is pronounced /ɛ̃/ such as
immangeable, immanquable /ɛ̃mɑ̃ʒabl, ɛ̃mɑ̃kabl/ (but usually this prefix isn't nasalized).
There's also the word
enhardir /ɑ̃ardir/, which is (to my knowledge) the only one where a nasal vowel is directly followed by another vowel in the same word.
Sumelic wrote:
Also, there are some words ending in nasal vowels that have /n/-liaison without loss of vowel nasality, like un and bien.
Also the preposition
en, such as
en arrivant /ɑ̃ narivɑ̃/.
Sumelic wrote:
It seems loss of nasality is optional for mon, ton, son:
https://forum.wordreference.com/threads/1165783Yep. My dialect keeps the nasality for these words, but many other dialects (including some close-to-Parisian ones) lose the nasality here.
- I say
mon ami as /mɔ̃ na mi/.
- Some other people say /mɔ na mi/.
linguoboy wrote:
This all makes me glad I learned Cajun, which didn't undergo denasalisation before nasal consonants (and which doesn't have any crazy passé défini forms to memorise).
Well, you could decide to never actually use the
passé simple: apart from French lessons, you'll never miss it.