Off-gliding to G

[David Bowie]

<gbarrett at WORLDNEWYORK.ORG> wrote:

> I received this query from a listener to the radio show and wonder if
> anyone has any thoughts about it. Is it something you've noticed
> yourself as being more common? Can you recommend reading on this
> particular habit?

>> I wondered if you were aware that, in your broadcasts, you tend to
>> pronounce a hard G at the ends of words like "sing". I am running
>> into this habitual off-gliding more and more with my acting
>> students. When I point this out to them, they are shocked that you
>> could say a word like "sing" without that hard G sound.

I missed this the first time around, but i've found this to be pretty
frequent in the speech of a sizable minority of my student in intro to
lx courses both in Florida and Alaska.

It makes teaching transcription of engma-containing words messy--the
fact that some of them actually *do* pronounce sing as [sINg] rather
than [sIN], along with the orthographic convention of spelling [N] as
<ng> much of the time, makes it difficult to convince them that there
really are cases (like the word bank) where [N] occurs without a
following [g].

--
David Bowie                                  http://www.pmpkn.net/lx/
    Jeanne's Two Laws of Chocolate: If there is no chocolate in the
    house, there is too little; some must be purchased. If there is
    chocolate in the house, there is too much; it must be consumed.

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