Chinglish

[Herb Stahlke]

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.

Herb





On Mon, Aug 25, 2008 at 6:07 PM, Benjamin Barrett <gogaku at ix.netcom.com> wrote:
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Benjamin Barrett <gogaku at IX.NETCOM.COM>
> Subject:      Re: Chinglish
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> I just did, too. I hear the vowel of "scene" as identical or close to
> that of "sing". That of "sin" sounds completely different. Different
> vowels for different folks, I guess. FWIW BB
>
> On Aug 25, 2008, at 2:26 PM, Herb Stahlke wrote:
>
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>> -----------------------
>> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>> Poster:       Herb Stahlke <hfwstahlke at GMAIL.COM>
>> Subject:      Re: Chinglish
>> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> I just listened to the M-W.com pronunciations of "sin," "sing," and
>> "scene."  In that speaker's pronunciation "sing" very clearly has the
>> vowel of "sin," not of "scene."
>
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