- Emilce Rees
Updated: Jan 10, 2022

The poor archi-phoneme has died a death - and I have been meaning to resurrect him since Xmas. My idea is based on the fact that there is no minimal contrast involving the Spanish phonemes for N - /m/,
/n/ and /ɲ/ - the latter palatal nasal.
These are the common features in a neutralisation - if the distinction between them (here the 3 of them) - then a new sub-species is born: the archi-allo-phone.
See (and I quote)
https://www.staff.ncl.ac.uk/i.e.mackenzie/neutralir.htm
Thus /N/ in Spanish has five allophones (i.e. five for which separate IPA symbols exist). These are [m], [ɱ], [n], [ɲ] and [ŋ]. Which of these actually occurs in a given context is determined entirely by the principle of assimilation.