Chinglish

[Douglas G. Wilson]

Herb Stahlke wrote:
> 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.
A footnote or three.

In fairly ordinary English (e.g., mine) (without caught/cot merger)
there is /aN/ as in "conquer" /kaNk at r/.

The onomatopoeic words "boing", "oink" (in MW3) have /OjN/ or so.

"Spraing" (in MW3, variant of "sprain" = potato spot) has /ejN/ or so
(says the book).

-- Doug Wilson

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