Spanish Dialect question

[Jetboy]

I had a friend who lived in Spain for a few decades starting when she was about seven, and I took the opportunity to practice my rather rusty Spanish. However, one thing about her (also rather rusty) Spanish that struck me as rather strange was an added [ŋ] in a few words, after /i/ and before /g/. Specifically, I remember she'd say /aminga/ for <amiga> and /inglesia/ for <iglesia>. Is this a characteristic of any particular Spanish dialects, or was she just misremembering the words?

[alice]

I think syllable-final velarization of nasals, which is a more general description of what this is, does happen in some Spanish dialects, but I don't remember where I read it. It's definitely characteristic of some varieties of Provençal and Gallo-Italian, for what that's worth.

[Drydic]

I think syllable-final velarization of nasals, which is a more general description of what this is, does happen in some Spanish dialects, but I don't remember where I read it. It's definitely characteristic of some varieties of Provençal and Gallo-Italian, for what that's worth.

But...there are no nasals in the positions he is describing.

[Jetboy]

I'm guessing he meant nasalisation of velars. I guess.

[alice]

I'm guessing he meant nasalisation of velars. I guess.

I got confused OK, the point is that in both of the cases I mentioned, there are velars where there weren't before, but it's unlikely that there's any common explanation for them both.

[MisterBernie]

Did that regularly happen to intervocalic g? [g] [ŋ] doesn't sound to implausible to me, though I have no idea if there's a Spanish accent/dialect that does so.

[Jetboy]

Well, the /g/ sticks around, it just gets a nasal in front of it. It wasn't a general /g/ thing, though; she definitely had [ɣ] in <luego>. The only other one I can think of with the /n/ is <amigo>, but that's more or less the same as <amiga>. Another nasal weirdness, though: she often referred to the language as /kasteʎando/ for <Castellano>.

[spats]

Are you sure she just didn't have a head cold

Japanese does the /g/-to-/N/-in-some-phonological-environments thing.
A number of languages have prenasalized voiced plosives (see especially Bantu languages in Africa).
Neither of these things are particularly remarkable.
That she has them in Spanish - that is pretty odd.

Let me provide a different theory: she's just not good at Spanish.
* Maybe she is confusing "ingles" with "iglesia" so she's pronouncing the latter wrong.
* Maybe she is having trouble pronouncing the [G] in "amiga" and is allowing the nasalization of the <m> to spread to the <g>. Spreading of nasalization is pretty common in some varieties of American English ("pundant" for "pundit", etc.).
* Maybe she's just getting "Castellano" wrong. Spanish forms gerunds with "-ndo/a"; that could be a source of confusion.

What I'm saying is that maybe because she's rusty, she's getting pronunciations and words muddled in her head. That's a pretty common thing to have happen when trying to speak a foreign language you haven't used in a while.

[Zhen Lin]

Japanese does the /g/-to-/N/-in-some-phonological-environments thing.

It's (mostly) allophonic though. There are also speakers who sometimes say [G] for /g/.

Orthographically, both Latin and Greek sometimes spell [N] as if it were /g/: in Latin, we have the sequence gn for /Nn/, and in Greek we have sequences γκ, γγ, γχ, γξ for /Nk Ng Nk_h Nks/. (Is there any evidence that /N/ was actually a conditioned allophone of /g/ in these languages?)

[Travis B.]

Japanese does the /g/-to-/N/-in-some-phonological-environments thing.

It's (mostly) allophonic though. There are also speakers who sometimes say [G] for /g/.

Orthographically, both Latin and Greek sometimes spell [N] as if it were /g/: in Latin, we have the sequence gn for /Nn/, and in Greek we have sequences γκ, γγ, γχ, γξ for /Nk Ng Nk_h Nks/. (Is there any evidence that /N/ was actually a conditioned allophone of /g/ in these languages?)

In the case of Greek, both ancient and modern, this seems to be merely orthographic in nature, whereas I would think that the most reasonable analysis of Latin <gn> would be that it actually indicated /ɡn/, which simply had the surface realization of [ŋn] through nasal assimilation, rather than positing a phoneme /ŋ/ in Latin that only occurred either before /n/ or before another velar.

[Jetboy]

What I'm saying is that maybe because she's rusty, she's getting pronunciations and words muddled in her head. That's a pretty common thing to have happen when trying to speak a foreign language you haven't used in a while.

Yeah, that would be my guess if this isn't a feature of a Castilian dialect. She'd been in the US for at least five years, and admitted to being out of practice.

[Peacekeeper]

in Latin, we have the sequence gn for /Nn/

Swedish has the same sequence, which makes me wonder if it's a feature inherited from Latin loanwords.

[linguoboy]

in Latin, we have the sequence gn for /Nn/

Swedish has the same sequence, which makes me wonder if it's a feature inherited from Latin loanwords.

It'd just a common form of assimilation. You see it in Korean, too, where there's no question of Latin influence, e.g. /hankwuknom/ > [hanguŋnom].