# תנ



## airelibre

I believe I've noticed an interesting casual pronunciation of this combination of letters, seen in words such as תנו, תני, תנועה. The tongue makes a closure at the alveolar ridge, and then the velum lowers to allow the air out through the nose before the closure at the alveolar ridge is released. So the tongue only ever makes one closure at the alveolar ridge, rather than two as in a careful pronunciation. Can anyone confirm this? Is there a specific IPA symbol or name for this phenomenon?


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## aavichai

I don't quite understand what you wrote
you mean that you feel that on the word תן the tongue touches the vlume just once without separation between the ת and the ?נ


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## Drink

If I understand correctly, I would describe it as a "nasal release." It happens in English and Russian as well for /dn/ and /tn/ (although the latter in English is usually a nasally released glottal stop rather than alveolar). In Russian it's sort of non-standard, but still very common. In English, it's basically required. Some English examples are _midnight_, _Edna_, _good news_. I have also always wondered if there is an IPA transcription for this and whether there is any research out there about this phenomenon in any language, but I have never encountered any.


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## hadronic

Well, I would not call it a phenomenon. There's not supposed to be any intervening vowel between ת and נ, just like in כש (kshe), תפילה, פסוקה, בליטה, not sure why you would expect two closures when the two consonants share the same place of articulation? Same with /ts/ in תשומת לב, or /tš/ in תשובה.


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## airelibre

aavichai said:


> I don't quite understand what you wrote
> you mean that you feel that on the word תן the tongue touches the vlume just once without separation between the ת and the ?נ



No, not the word "ten", but words with "tn" in them, like "tni", "tnu", "tnu'a".



Drink said:


> If I understand correctly, I would describe it as a "nasal release." It happens in English and Russian as well for /dn/ and /tn/ (although the latter in English is usually a nasally released glottal stop rather than alveolar). In Russian it's sort of non-standard, but still very common. In English, it's basically required. Some English examples are _midnight_, _Edna_, _good news_. I have also always wondered if there is an IPA transcription for this and whether there is any research out there about this phenomenon in any language, but I have never encountered any.



I hadn't released this in English but I believe you're right, thank you for pointing this out to me! Nasal release sounds good to me.



hadronic said:


> Well, I would not call it a phenomenon. There's not supposed to be any intervening vowel between ת and נ, just like in כש (kshe), תפילה, פסוקה, בליטה, not sure why you would expect two closures when the two consonants share the same place of articulation? Same with /ts/ in תשומת לב, or /tš/ in תשובה.



A phenomenon is anything that can be perceived as existing, I believe.

There _is_ supposed to be a short vowel between the two, and all the pronunciations of these words on Forvo have a careful pronunciation in which both the tav and the nun are pronounced individually.

"bl" is the same as in English, two separate sounds, one produced very quickly after the other. Not the same as in this case.

כש, תפ and פס: as far as I'm aware don't exist in English but are the same as "bl", two separate sounds.

תש/תס: these create affricates which are a single phoneme, and they're equivalent to צ and 'צ, although in careful speech they should be two separate sounds (otherwise why would תס and תש (ts) be written in the old texts the way they are and not with צ?).

But I still think this case of nasal release with תנ is different to all the above. It's one sound not two, like תס/צ, but the release is coming from a different place of articulation to the primary place of articulation which is the alveolar ridge. In the case of צ/תס, there is only one place of articulation involved and that is where the release occurs.


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## airelibre

And here we go, it is a recognised phenomenon and you got the name spot on, Drink: Nasal release - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I must admit I find it harder to perceive in words like "kidnap", but I definitely do it with "sudden".


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## hadronic

airelibre said:


> A phenomenon is anything that can be perceived as existing, I believe



I mean, nothing that should strike the English ear more than what it is.
I'm not calling it a phenomenon because it's not _unexpected_ (otherwise yes, everything is a phenomenon). For me, a phenomenon is for instance English "it is yours" pronounced as /itižorz/ or "last year" as /laščuhr/, because it is unexpected.



> There _is_ supposed to be a short vowel between the two



This is where I disagree. There is not supposed to be an intervening vowel, so the blending of /t/ into /n/ is really what it is, the blending of /t/ into /n/ (as you say, tongue touching ridge once, with lowering of soft palate to allow air through the nose).

That said, I see what you mean, in the specific case of stop plus homorganic nasal, there can be a more or less strong nasal pop (with sometimes even air blown through the nose when hold very strong), but English has it too, as does French (maintenant, quarante-neuf).  In Hebrew it is not noticeably strong, and the /tn-/ sequence is very often pronounced /nn-/ even at the beginning of words.

Also, in consonant clusters, the first stop is usually unreleased in most languages. Maybe the vowel you hear in forvo is due to a careful release of the /t/, rather than an actual vowel (I never heard anyone say /tenua/). But the stops are rarely fully released, including in English (as shown in the link shared above). It's a full release of /t/ that would actually be a _phenomenon_ 



> (otherwise why would תס and תש (ts) be written in the old texts the way they are and not with צ?).



Because in Biblical there used to be vowel, but that's not the case in Modern anymore.
Also, no one really knows how צ used to be pronounced. In any case, תס/תש didn't turn the cluster to emphatic. And also because the orthography is etymological more than phonetical.



> But I still think this case of nasal release with תנ is different to all the above. It's one sound not two, like תס/צ, but the release is coming from a different place of articulation to the primary place of articulation which is the alveolar ridge.



I'm perplexe here. From what place does the release happen?


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## hadronic

One precision: ת is followed by vowel /e/only when it stands for the 2nd pers conjugation prefix (תנצל is never /t̚natsel/).


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## Drink

airelibre said:


> And here we go, it is a recognised phenomenon and you got the name spot on, Drink: Nasal release - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia



Thanks! I don't know how I managed never to have googled that.



airelibre said:


> I must admit I find it harder to perceive in words like "kidnap", but I definitely do it with "sudden".



Probably because no one ever pronounces "kidnap" any other way, so you have nothing to compare it to, while for "sudden" some people actually pronouce this with a vowel in between.


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## hadronic

I would say that in _kidnap_, because of the intervocalic position of the cluster, we more easily analyze the first consonant as belonging to the first syllable's coda and the second one to the second syllable's onset, so that the cluster doesn't feel like one any longer. In _sudden_, no nucleic vowel helps to dissociate the cluster, the situation being worsened by the nucleic / syllabic nature the final /n/.

Same in Hebrew with תנועה and התניה. The latter doesn't feel as "weird" as the former, while neither actually releases the stop.


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## bazq

In my Phonetics class we used [tʷ] [tⁿ] [tʲ] for these secondary articulations (nasal release is a kind of secondary articulation). If I remember correctly they are not as mandatory and done unconsciously like in Russian for example, according to my Phonetics prof's research. From a personal point of view, this kind of articulation is unstable at the moment in Modern Hebrew. Most of the time people pronounce תנועה as [tⁿ(n)u'a], but if the nasalization is evident the speaker will notice it, and might repeat the word with a more careful pronunciation. Others never use the nasal release and insert a (ultra-) short [e] vowel in the cluster. I don't think you'll find an adult speaker who hasn't noticed this "error" (from the Hebrew speaking layman's POV), unlike Russian where it goes unnoticed to my understanding. 
But it could be just me and my environment though.


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