Chinglish

Benjamin Barrett gogaku at IX.NETCOM.COM
Mon Aug 25 23:36:34 UTC 2008


To put it another way, I'd consider scene and thing to be a half-rhyme
(or a five-sixths rhyme), but thing and sin to not rhyme at all. BB

On Aug 25, 2008, at 4:28 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
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> 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:
>> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
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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:
>>
>>> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
>>> -----------------------
>>> 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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