Letter NH

Letter nh, known as "voiceless n", is pronounced with the tongue in the same place as for letter n except that the vocal cords are not vibrating. Like n, air flows out through the nose rather than the mouth. This sound occurs only at the end of a syllable.

Click on a video below to see and hear Mrs. Irene Arnold pronouncing words with NH.

Click below to hear Mrs. Irene Arnold illustrating the difference between nh and n at the end of words.

When a noun ends with nh the nh sound is voiced and lengthened when the noun is possessed. This is written as nn. Click below to hear Mrs. Laura Sanford illustrating the difference between nh and nn. This also occurs with nouns that end in n or n’.

Tanacross n is a voiced alveolar nasal stop. In stem-initial position its phonetic realization varies between nasal [m], prenasalized [nd], and fully occluded [d]. Note that this fully occluded variant differs from the phoneme written d in the practical orthography, which is realized as a voiceless unaspirated stop [t]. Unlike the variation between the regular and occluded variants of the bilabial nasal, the occurrence of the occluded variant of the alveolar nasal is largely predictable. The occluded variant occurs stem-initially in stems which do not contain another nasal or nasalized vowel. Thus [nûun] 'animal' but [nduu] 'island'.

The distribution of the sounds [nd] versus [d] is more difficult to predict. For at least some speakers the pre-nasalized variant occurs following first-person singular voiced classifier, i.e., ish- and eg-.

medhegndax [meðɛgndax] 'I forgot'
medhildax [meðildax] 'you forgot'

In stem-final position the alveolar nasal may occur lengthened, written nn. Thus compare:

kón' 'fire'
shkónn' 'my fire'

Tanacross nh is a voiceless alveolar nasal stop. It occurs only in stem-final position. n is the voiced counterpart to nh, so that words which end in nh occur with n in their possessed forms.

menh 'lake'
Dihthâad Měnn' 'Mansfield Lake'

similar sounds

N   YH  

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