unpalatalized consonants, and may thus be treated as allophones of a single phoneme. In the past, was closer to , which is acoustically more similar to . Nasal Nasal vowels do not feature uniform nasality over their duration. Phonetically, they consist of an oral vowel followed by a nasal semivowel or (są is pronounced , which sounds closer to Portuguese são than French sont – all three words mean '(they) are'). Therefore, they are phonetically diphthongs. (For nasality following other vowel nuclei, see § Allophony below.) Phonological status The nasal phonemes appear in older phonological descriptions of Polish e.g. , , . In more recent descriptions the orthographic nasal vowels ą, ę are analyzed as two phonemes in all contexts e.g. , . Before a fricative and in word-final position (in the case of ą) they are transcribed as an oral vowel followed by a nasal consonant or . Under such an analysis, the list of consonantal phonemes is extended by a velar nasal phoneme or by two nasal approximants , . Distribution If analyzed as separate phonemes, nasal vowels do not occur except before a fricative and in word-final position. When the letters ą and ę appear before stops and affricates, they indicate an oral or followed by a nasal consonant homorganic with the following consonant. For example, kąt ('angle', 'corner') is , gęba ('mouth') is , pięć ('five') is and bąk ('bumble bee') is , as if they were spelled *kont, *gemba, *pieńć and *bonk. Before or , nasality is lost altogether and ą and ę pronounced as oral // or //. The sequence is also denasalized to // in word-final position, as in 'I will be'. Historical development Distinctive vowel length was inherited from late Proto-Slavic, although in Polish only some pretonic long vowels and vowels with the neoacute retained length. Additional vowel lengths were introduced in Proto-Polish (as in other West Slavic languages) as a result of compensatory lengthening when a yer in the next syllable disappeared according to Havlík's law. In Polish this only happened in penultimate syllables (which thus became final syllables) before a voiced consonant (in other Slavic languages where a similar process occurred this could be more general). The resultant system of vowel lengths was similar to what is today preserved in Czech and to a lesser degree in Slovak, although the distribution of the sounds often differed (for example in Czech