the spoken sounds of ing/ink and ang/ank

[David Borowitz]

I haven't yet looked at a spectrogram of Tom's examples, but it sounds to me
like the pre-nasal i's are, in addition to being lax, also somewhat
nasalized. IIRC nasalization of front vowels in English is pretty well
attested, though perhaps more clearly so with /æ/ as in 'can.'

On Mon, Jun 2, 2008 at 12:02 PM, Herb Stahlke <hfwstahlke at gmail.com> 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: the spoken sounds of ing/ink and ang/ank
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> I listened to your comments and pronunciations, and I disagree that
> you have IPA [i] in "sing" or "sink."  It is well known among
> phoneticians that a final velar nasal will raise a lax high front
> vowel slightly, but not to the extent of making it a tense vowel, and
> you don't pronounce it with a tense vowel.  What surprised me though
> was that you pronounce all "-ing" forms with a final voiced velar
> stop, including in "singer," which you say does not have it.  There
> are dialects, most notably Long Island, that pronounce a [g] after
> final [ŋ], but I'm not sure that yours is that Long Island dialect.
> What surprised me even more was that when you were demonstrating the
> lax [ɩ] of "sin" as you think it might sound before [ŋ], you were
> saying an alveolar nasal [n] followed by a voiced velar stop [g], a
> combination that simply doesn't occur in syllable-final position in
> English.  In other words, [sɩng] is not a possible word in English.
>
> Herb
>
> On Sun, Jun 1, 2008 at 3:36 PM, Tom Zurinskas <truespel at hotmail.com>
> wrote:
> > ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> > Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> > Poster:       Tom Zurinskas <truespel at HOTMAIL.COM>
> > Subject:      the spoken sounds of ing/ink and ang/ank
> >
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> >
> > Below is a qlippit of me talking about the ing-ink ang-ank issues.  Click
> the link and click the play arrow to play the qlippit when it comes up.
> >
> > http://www.qlipmedia.com/wqb/index.php?discid=b9da9b86
> >
> > Hopefully it will work.  Let me know if it plays.  I cannot launch
> qlippit lately.  Perhaps it is security blocked.  Anyone else having
> trouble?
> >
> >
> >
> > Tom Zurinskas, USA - CT20, TN3, NJ33, FL5+
> > See truespel.com - and the 4 truespel books plus "Occasional Poems" at
> authorhouse.com.
> >
> > _________________________________________________________________
> > Make every e-mail and IM count. Join the i'm Initiative from Microsoft.
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> >
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> >
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>



-- 
It is better to be quotable than to be honest.
-Tom Stoppard

Borowitz