Note 17:
The grapheme êm
is not always pronounced with this
double nasalised diphthong,
but only in some words, like
têm ©,
vêm and
mantêm ©,
and other verbal forms derived from verbs "ter" and "vir".
(Are there any other examples? I am not aware of one.
Suggestions welcome.)
On the other hand, cases where êm gets the normal single nasalised
diphthong are extremely rare: the only ones I could find, using the word list
in the tool Ergane, are: têmporas (temples)
and êmbolo (piston).
In the song I took the sample of the word
têm ©
from, is also the word demência.
Here the êm simply denotes a nasalised /e~/, which gets a circumflex
accent because otherwise the
Stress rules would dictate that the stress be on the i.
The difference between
tem ©,
and
têm ©
(absense and presence of the circumflex accent) becomes a difference between the acute
and the circumflex accent in verbs that have ter as their second element:
Confer mantém (he maintains) and
mantêm ©,
(they maintain).
Other verbs with this spelling / sound behaviour are abster, ater, conter, deter,
entreter, obter, reter and suster.
These accents normally indicate tongue height of the vowel
(acute: low á / mid-low é or ó; circumflex: mid-low â / mid-high ê or ô).
But in this special case they distinguish the single diphthong (no accent or acute) from
the double diphthong (circumflex).
Copyright © 2000-2007 by R. Harmsen