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1. Are the vowels in "vînmes" and "tînmes" nasalised?
2. If so, are these the only examples of nasalised vowels appearing directly before nasal consonants in the next syllable?
3. Besides "vîntes" and "tîntes", how many other words have a circumflexed nasal vowel?

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1. Yes
2. No because they're monosyllabic

As Vijay said, the /m/ would usually be considered tautosyllabic with the preceding vowel in words like this. I can't think of any other words with nasalized vowels followed by coda nasal consonants (automne has /ɔn/, damne has /an/, hymne has /imn/, indemne has /ɛmn/).

There are a greater number of words with a nasal vowel followed by a nasal consonant in another syllable like emmener, ennui. Link Some examples with in-/im- are mentioned on the following page: https://french.stackexchange.com/questi ... e-in-et-im

Also, there are some words ending in nasal vowels that have /n/-liaison without loss of vowel nasality, like un and bien. It seems loss of nasality is optional for mon, ton, son: https://forum.wordreference.com/threads/1165783


None that I know of.

Isn't that a matter of interpretation? (I.e. wouldn't /vɛ̃.mə/ and /tɛ̃.mə/ be alternative ways to transcribe it?)

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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).

The thing is that in a "standard" Parisian-type accent, there normally wouldn't be a final schwa phonetically, and it's pretty arguable to postulate that it exists phonemically (it can help explain some things, but so does postulating that "petit" ends with an unpronounced /t/, and if you keep on going along these lines you get something like a Sound Pattern of English analysis where you have all these history-based morpho-phonemes you end up including for theoretical reasons). The usual phonemic transcriptions would be /vɛ̃m/ and /tɛ̃m/.

Even in meridonal French, where word-final schwas are generally pronounced, it's tricky to say how syllabification of the preceding consonants works. Of course maximizing onsets is a general principle, and the set of allowable consonants and consonant clusters in this position is generally more like onsets (or codas + onsets) than like codas in other positions (e.g. you can have clusters like /tr/, /bl/) so phonotactics also seems to point towards a rightwards syllabification, but the patterns of vowel allophony point towards a leftwards syllabification: the "law of position" says that [e] and [o] are used in open syllables and [ɛ] and [ɔ] in closed syllables, and the latter are what is used in syllables before a consonant or consonant cluster followed by word-final /ə/; meridional speakers say things like /ˈrɔzə/ "rose" and [tɛtə] "tête".

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.


Also the preposition en, such as en arrivant /ɑ̃ narivɑ̃/.


Yep. 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/.


Well, you could decide to never actually use the passé simple: apart from French lessons, you'll never miss it.

Isn't this equally true of verbs derived from the same stems, e.g. parvînmes, soutînmes?


That's true as far as active knowledge goes, but I ultimately had to learn these forms to read pre-contemporary French literature.

Well if you wanted to write a story, heck if you wanted to write a children's story for your grandchildren, you would need to know how to use the passe simple.

You're saying otherwise my grandchildren wouldn't understand it?

You're right, I had forgotten about them. My sentence should have been "The verbs vînmes, tînmes and other verbs derived from them are the only words where a nasal vowel is followed by a coda nasal consonant".


That's true if you're writing a "serious" novel, or even a "young adult' novel (à la Harry Potter), but books for younger children are often written using the présent or the passé composé.