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> but I do remember seeing at least one in which all four of these were distinct.

None of the major Indian languages I'm familiar with have 4 nasal phones, from either the Indo-Aryan or Dravidian language families.

In the Indo-Aryan languages, the convergence of the various nasals is so complete that they are all often represented with a single "dot" diacritic character when they occur at word junctions.

I'd be open to hearing examples of Indian languages that have 4 nasal phonemes, though.



It was Kannada, a coworker's language. Per Wikipedia it has five nasals, each with its own glyph:

m (ಮ) n (ನ) ɳ (ಣ) ɲ (ಞ) ŋ (ಙ)


> Per Wikipedia it has five nasals, each with its own glyph: m (ಮ) n (ನ) ɳ (ಣ) ɲ (ಞ) ŋ (ಙ)

There are 5 nasal glyphs, but like in other Indian languages, 2 (velar and palatal) are allophones of the others, leaving only 3 actual phonemes. Indian scripts are often overspecified, and not every glyph represents a phoneme.




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