Among the numerous factors known or suspected to affect the length of a syllable in English is the nature of the immediately following syllable. It is widely recognized (P. Fijn van Draat, 1910, p. 14; Jones, 1956, §§ 886–7; Bolinger, 1965, pp. 168–9; Lehiste, 1972, p. 2021) that in a succession of monosyllabic words a word containing a full vowel will be longer when followed by another such word than when followed by a word containing a reduced vowel.1 Van Draat's example is Money makes the mare to go versus Money makes the mare go: in the latter, ‘We pronounce mare in two syllables.’ In the former one can say that the reduced to ‘borrows time’ from the full mare.

Traditional analyses of French recognize three nasal consonant phonemes /m n ɲ/ appearing in the labial, apical and palatal orders respectively. What is interesting about this situation is that while French contains labial and apical oral stops /p b t d / corresponding to /m/ and /n/, there are no palatal occlusives linked to /ɲ/. Conversely, in the velar order where we find /k/ and /g/, there is no velar nasal representative. Thus, in a widely used presentation, Malmberg notes that

‘Le français n'a pas de phonème /ɲ/. Un son [ɲ] peut exceptionnellement apparaître comme variante par suite d'une assimilation de /g/ en contact avec une nasal: une longue minute [yn1Ʒɲminyt]. Dans les emprunts anglais comme smoking, parking, camping, il semble qu'un nombre croissant de Français prononcent une nasale vélaire /ɲ/.’

(1969: 106).

One can also cite the words of Fouché (1959: XIX), who notes that,

‘Il faut aussi ajouter à cette liste [de consonnes françaises] le son [ɲ] (= n vélaire) de la terminaison anglaise -ing qui a pénétré par voie d'emprunt dans le système consonantique français; cf. meeting, parking, smoking, etc.’

Neither author, however, explores the question in any detail.

In the introduction to Part 1 (Miller and Tench, 1980) we claimed that although we were not presenting a comprehensive account of Hausa intonation, we were presenting aspects of it that had not received specific attention before. In the first part, we presented our findings in respect of isolated utterances; in this part, we wish to extend that analysis to cover features of Hausa intonation in connected text. Our procedure is to present an intonational analysis of two fables, each with a detailed commentary, and to accompany this up with some general comments.

Pirahã is interesting from both a phonetic and a phonological perspective. While possessing an apparently simple phonemic inventory (consisting of eight consonants, three vowels and two tones) it demonstrates a great deal of variation at the phonetic level. It is the purpose of this paper to document two phonetic rarities in Pirahã, one of which, [i] has been recorded for no other language, to the knowledge of the present writer.