Chinglish

[Herb Stahlke]

On "spraing," the OED suggests Scandinavian origin with a Middle
Icelandic form "sprang."  That would suggest Northern borrowing and
perhaps the fronting of [a] to [E] as in "bairn," "laird," etc.
That's just a guess, but it seems plausible.  That would make it a
dialect borrowing if it's found elsewhere in BE or in AmE.  There's
not a lot of accounting for onomatopeia; it's not unusual for such
forms to deviate from normal phonotactics.  "Conquer," "congress," and
other words like them show that [aN] occurs in French and Latinate
loans, but can you think of any monosyllables with [aN]?  These are
clearly assimilatory, but then so are all other instances of English
/N/.  The difference is that with monosyllables the final /g/ has been
lost, with the exception of a few dialects.  Do a/O merger speakers
have /a/ in "long" and "strong"?

Herb

On Mon, Aug 25, 2008 at 10:00 PM, Douglas G. Wilson <douglas at nb.net> wrote:
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Douglas G. Wilson" <douglas at NB.NET>
> Subject:      Re: Chinglish
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Herb Stahlke wrote:
>> It's pretty well known in phonetics that a syllable-final ang raises a
>> high front vowel a bit, so the lax high front vowel of "sin" and the
>> vowel of "sing" are not phonetically identical.  However, that raising
>> effect doesn't change the phonotactic fact that English does not allow
>> tense vowels before ang.  Using ASCII IPA
>> (http://www.kirshenbaum.net/IPA/ascii-ipa.pdf), English has only the
>> vowel plus ang sequences [sIN], [lENT], [s&N], [sVN], and [sON].  The
>> slightly raised lax high front vowel before /N/ is simply a positional
>> variant, what used to be called an allophone, of /I/.  (I tried to
>> change the font to Times New Roman so that upper case <i> and lower
>> case <L> would be more clearly distinguished, but it didn't work.  I
>> even had to reverse the cases of the symbols to make that last
>> sentence clear.)  I'd describe the variant of /I/ before /N/ as a
>> raised lax high front vowel, not as a tense high front vowel.
> A footnote or three.
>
> In fairly ordinary English (e.g., mine) (without caught/cot merger)
> there is /aN/ as in "conquer" /kaNk at r/.
>
> The onomatopoeic words "boing", "oink" (in MW3) have /OjN/ or so.
>
> "Spraing" (in MW3, variant of "sprain" = potato spot) has /ejN/ or so
> (says the book).
>
> -- Doug Wilson
>
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