the spoken sounds of ing/ink and ang/ank

[Mark Mandel]

Oh boy. I've never heard of such a bad case of graphophonism.

m a m

On Mon, Jun 2, 2008 at 3:02 PM, Herb Stahlke <hfwstahlke at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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

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