All 40 USA English phonemes (Was Re: Eggcorn? "warn" > "worn")

[Randy Alexander]

On Wed, Feb 18, 2009 at 12:36 PM, Tom Zurinskas <truespel at hotmail.com> wrote:
> Google on "phoneme" and see the definitions.

Google has a "define:" function, so typing in "define:phoneme"
(without quotes) gives a list of definitions.  The second one that
pops up for me is from Wikipedia, which does mention meaning.

The first definition is from Princeton University's Wordnet, and does
not, but it should.  I'm sending an email to one of Wordnet's
founders, Christiane Fellbaum (who I took a German Reading class from
back in the day!) to alert her of this, as it should be changed.

> I dissagree that the "g" in "sung" is mostly silent as said in sentences.

There's a lot of things I disagree with, too, and a lot of impressions
that I might have about how things are said, but when most of the
world's best linguists say otherwise, I either have to take their more
learned word for it, or I have to write a revolutionary and
groundbreaking paper that gives compelling evidence that they are all
wrong.

There are, in fact, dialects and idiolects in which speakers generally
add a /g/ sound on the end of velar nasals, but the current research
in dialectology does not show that this is the norm.  In fact it is
very much the minority.  If you have compelling evidence to the
contrary, you can present it.  Bear in mind that personal anecdotes
only count as the very lowest form of evidence (when there is a lack
of better evidence).  Since recordings, and software for analyzing
them have basically become the norm these days, you would have to use
them as evidence.  You would have to have a large body of recordings
of people saying velar nasals in sentences, and show (in Praat or
similar analytical software) that the majority of the people were
adding a velar plosive after the velar nasals.  You would also have to
show that the sampled population recorded is representative of the
population of speakers that you claim to have this feature -- in this
case, most American English speakers.

--
Randy Alexander
Jilin City, China
My Manchu studies blog:
http://www.bjshengr.com/manchu

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