m & n

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On Aug 7, 2004, at 6:50 AM, Thomas Paikeday wrote:

> Has anyone heard "Guantanamo" pronounced as "Guantamano"? I thouhgt I
> heard
> it thrice last week  (not a slip of the tongue, meseems) from Bob
> Hunter (of
> CityTV, Toronto), a well-known reporter and commentator. Which reminds
> me of
> Carl Sagan (I may be trying to out-Ripley Ripley, but Bob seems in good
> company) saying "anemone" as "amenome". I was too young at that time
> to be
> suspected of Alzheimer's.

replacement of the sequence ...n...m... by ...m...n... is *very*
common, as a slip in speech or writing/typing, and especially in
language acquisition.  for some considerable time, my daughter produced
"cinnamon" as "cimmanon", and "animal" as "aminal", and performed the
same reordering for invented words.  these two reorderings are so
common for children learning english that "cimmanon" and "aminal" have
been used to name various things associated with children; google on
<cinammon> and on <aminal animal> (to weed out most of the references
to the drug Aminal) and you'll see some of these, plus some things that
look like slips and others that might have escaped correction and
survived into adult language for some people.

there is some literature trying to make a lot out of a general
preference for sequencing consonants so that they move from front to
back.  there was some stuff in Science magazine a few years ago.  i
*think* it's summarized by john locke in "Movement patterns in spoken
language" (Science, 21 April 2000, 449-51), but i can't find my copy
and for some reason can't get my browser to access it (though i
subscribe to ScienceOnline).

arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu)