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> [ɴ] is a back nasal consonant

Not quite! This is a peculiarity of Japanese transcription: the moraic nasal [0] is often transcribed as /ɴ/ or /N/ in phonemic representation, while its phonetic realisation varies between [m~n~ɲ~ŋ]; it is true uvular [ɴ] only utterance-finally, but apparently even that is controversial.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_phonology#Moraic_nasa...




I wrote [ɴ] instead of /ɴ/ for a reason. It's true that the phoneme /ɴ/ has various realizations (including as no consonant at all, only nasalizing the preceding vowel), but when considering "pan" in isolation, the /ɴ/ is utterance-final and has the commonly accepted realization [ɴ].


I can agree with that. Thanks for clarifying!

(Maybe I’m just too used to people getting confused about this stuff…)




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