The nasalization of vowels/diphthongs in the ancestry of current Brazilian Portuguese

Abstract

This paper aims to analyse phonological phenomena from the medieval period of Portuguese (or Galician-Portuguese), investigating vowels and diphthongs’ nasalisation in 250 religious and secular troubadours’ poetical texts. Our objective is to verify whether the diacritic tilde in the graphic representation of words that survived in the considered
manuscripts corresponds to an abbreviation of a nasal consonant or to a signal of the vowel/diphthong nasalisation. The methodology is based on the consideration of the word origin (=etymology) and the distribution of the graphic marks of nasalisation inside the word. Data
show that nasality in the archaic period originates from nasal consonants present in previous periods in which it was graphically represented by n, which disappeared at the phonetic level, transferring its nasal feature to the nearest vowel. In this context, even if the nasal is not phonetically realised as a consonant but as vowel nasalisation, syllables containing nasal vowels phonologically still correspond to a syllable closed by a nasal element.