Chinglish

[Tom Zurinskas]

There's a paper in the Summer 2008 "American Speech" which we members of American Dialect Society receive quarterly.  It's about "ING" pronunciation differences between north/south W Va and other factors.  It looks at the pronunciation of "n" in  the suffix ING (I don't know why it's capitalized) and whether the "n" is alveolar (a normal front "n" made by the tongue tip contacting the top gum alveolar ridge) or whether its velar (a back "n" made by the back of the tongue raised to contact the velar region behind the palate).

It was not explained how it was determined which sound for the letter "n" in suffix "-ing" was which.

I would assume it was done by trained listeners to sound files instead of viewing spectrograms.  I assume the key things were that if the "i" sounds like long e ~ee and the "g" is pronounced, then it's velar.  If the "i" sounds like short "i" and the "g" is not pronounced, then its alveolar.  The ~ee sound corresponds to a raised back of the tongue in anticipation of going to the "g" and thus velarizes the "n" in transition.  The ~i sound anticipates not going to the "g" so the "n" is normal or alveolar.  For instance the word "singin'" has a velar "n" first and an alveolar "n" second.

Tom Zurinskas, USA - CT20, TN3, NJ33, FL5+
See truespel.com - and the 4 truespel books plus "Occasional Poems" at authorhouse.com.

> Date: Tue, 2 Sep 2008 01:21:13 -0400
> From: nwhitman at AMERITECH.NET
> Subject: Re: Chinglish
> To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
>
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender: American Dialect Society
> Poster: Neal Whitman
> Subject: Re: Chinglish
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Now at Literal-Minded:
> http://literalminded.wordpress.com/2008/09/02/engma-enigma/.
>
> Links of interest (also in post):
>
> 2007 Phonoloblog post by Eric Bakovic on native-speaker intuitions, hearing
> pre-engma [I] as [i]:
> http://camba.ucsd.edu/blog/phonoloblog/2007/06/19/evening/
>
> Paper by David Peterson, on pre-velar tensing of front vowels (even more so
> than with other speakers) among Southern California speakers:
> http://dedalvs.free.fr/writing/dpetersoncomps.pdf
>
> Neal
>
> Neal Whitman
> Home: 614 501-1890
> Cell: 614 260-1622
> Email: nwhitman at ameritech.net
> Blog: http://literalminded.wordpress.com
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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