"Nasal" commonly refers to nasal vowels (as it does here), which are vowels produced with blockage of the oral cavity and release of air through the nasal passages, or to nasal stops, which are consonants produced in like manner. This is basic phonetic terminology (and, as such, covered fairly well on Wikipedia).
Pitch, speed, cadence, etc.--these are all suprasegmentals (if they are phonemic) or aspects of prosody (if they are not). What I mean is that in a language like Panjabi or Swedish, the relative pitch of a syllable can change the meaning of word, so you have to treat it as a suprasegmental phoneme. In English, pitch may have some pragmatic meaning (e.g. expressing interrogation, worry, boredom, sarcasm, etc.) so it gets handled under prosody.
You're not the first person to notice this similarity within the North Sea area. I've had people tell me that the German of Hamburg is also spoken with a peculiarly English-like intonation. I don't know if anyone's studied this particular phenomenon, but it is the kind of thing that does come under examination in linguistics.
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momijizukamori
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Date: 2007-05-26 02:55 am (UTC)Pitch, speed, cadence, etc.--these are all suprasegmentals (if they are phonemic) or aspects of prosody (if they are not). What I mean is that in a language like Panjabi or Swedish, the relative pitch of a syllable can change the meaning of word, so you have to treat it as a suprasegmental phoneme. In English, pitch may have some pragmatic meaning (e.g. expressing interrogation, worry, boredom, sarcasm, etc.) so it gets handled under prosody.
You're not the first person to notice this similarity within the North Sea area. I've had people tell me that the German of Hamburg is also spoken with a peculiarly English-like intonation. I don't know if anyone's studied this particular phenomenon, but it is the kind of thing that does come under examination in linguistics.