Chinglish

[Herb Stahlke]

We may simply speak different dialects.  I'm Inland Northern, and
"thing" and "scene" don't come close to rhyming for me.  Both the
vowels and the codas are different.  "Thing" and "sin" are a half
rhyme for me, just the opposite of your perception of them.  One
measure of whether English treats the high front vowel before /N/ as
tense or lax would be how it changes in, for example, the Southern
Vowel Shift.  If it's tense, I would expect [TIN] to diphthongize to
[T at IN].  I don't know if it does, but I suspect someone like dInIs
could tell us.  That still would not show that it's tense in other
dialects but rather that it was tense in the dialects that the SVC
took place in.

Herb

On Mon, Aug 25, 2008 at 7:36 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
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>
> 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:
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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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