Nasal vowels

Vowels are phonetically nasalized in the environment of nasal consonants, for example,

JamE does not allow the variable deletion of a nasal consonant, leaving nasalization of the preceding vowel as the only evidence of its presence underlyingly. Thus, JamE [sõm] ‘some’, unlike its JamC cognate, can never be realized as * [sõ] ‘some’. In addition, the attested role of phonemic vowel nasalization JamC is absent in JamE. In JamC, there are items lexically specified to have a nasalized vowel with no following nasal consonant. In JamE, no such items exist. Below are the JamE cognates of the JamC items with lexically specified nasalized vowels. As can be seen, they both occur in JamE with an /nt/ sequence in the coda.