Teenglish from England

[Laurence Horn]

At 11:03 AM +0000 9/16/09, Tom Zurinskas wrote:
>New teenage words from England (perhaps not only England)
>
>http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1213626/Teenglish-From-Frape-Neek-words-used-teenagers-baffle-adults.html
>
>When I say the word "teenglish" my tongue goes alveolar (top front),
>but for English it's velar (top back).  Yet the vowel befor the "n"
>is still long e, ~ee.  ~teenglish ~Eenglish.
>
>Tom Zurinskas, USA - CT20, TN3, NJ33, FL7+
>see truespel.com phonetic spelling
>_________________________________________________________________

and for me "Teenglish" (the variety of English associated with teens)
differs from "Tinglish" (the variety of English that makes you
tingle) in and only in the quality of the vowel before the nasal,
which is additional evidence that the vowel in the latter case (or in
"English", or "Singlish" [Singaporean English]) is a lax [I], not a
tense [i].  (Of course I might also render the former with an
alveolar consonant if I wanted to stress the morphological structure
of "teen" + "English".)

LH

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