Analysis of nasal diphthongs and hiatuses in Ancient Portuguese

Abstract

Abstract: The objective of this research is to investigate sequences of nasal vowels in the medieval period of the historical formation of Portuguese, analysing which sequences form hiatuses or diphthongs. The present research aims also to investigate the reason why most of current Brazilian Portuguese diphthongs were realized as hiatuses in that historical period. This study considers as corpus a selection of 250 Galician-Portuguese cantigas, aiming to determine which sequences were diphthongs or hiatuses, considering the metrical structure and the occurrence of rhyme in the poems. Syllable structure in that period is also considered to establish the nasal nature of vowels in troubadours’ language, from an analysis based on non-linear phonology. The collected data show that nasal vowel sequences in Archaic Portuguese were always realised as hiatuses. Therefore, in that period, there were not nasal diphthongs yet,because nasal vowels were constituted by a vowel and a nasal consonantal segment. In this sense, archaic language nasal vowels could not be interpreted as intrinsically nasal, being the result of spreading the nasal feature of a non-specified consonant positioned in the syllabic coda.