m & n

[Wilson Gray]

On Aug 7, 2004, at 12:24 PM, Arnold M. Zwicky wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Arnold M. Zwicky" <zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: m & n
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
> --------
>
> 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)

FWIW, I said "irrevelant" well into my 30's, before a friend pointed it
out to me. By that time, it took me many hours of practice to learn to
say "irrelevant."

-Wilson Gray

>