Comments on: Evening

By: Engma Enigma « Literal-Minded

Engma Enigma « Literal-Minded — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 05:13:42 +0000

[...] heard ing and ang with long E and long A. Doug identified them as such when I asked him. And in a Phonoloblog post from 2007, Eric Bakovic says: One thing I’ve always found hard about teaching English phonetics [...]

By: Ed

Ed — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 15:23:40 +0000

Eric, don’t you remember that [piŋk] house I lived in? Or is this something
different?

By: MM

MM — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 07:05:24 +0000

I take the main point, but I was shocked to realize that Americans distinguish between been and bean!

Ignorant reader

By: Ben Yang

Ben Yang — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 18:58:01 +0000

Oh, I could also add that this is for careful speech. For more casual speech, the /ɪŋ/ morpheme is realized as [ɪn] or even [ən] (due to the characteristic centralization of Californian vowels). I want to mess with this a little more and try to figure out some contexts.

Ben Yang

By: Ben Yang

Ben Yang — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 18:43:37 +0000

Hi Prof. Bakovic, it's been a long time!

I've tested myself and a few friends who are all native Californians and we did detect a vowel much more similar to [i] than [ɪ]. One interesting thing I noticed is that the length is very similar between the two vowels. I would say it shouldn't even be transcribed with a [ː] in this context. However, for all other instances of [i], it was long. I'd love to find out if this is present in other young American English speakers (from outside of California)

Ben Yang

By: Jessica

Jessica — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 16:01:19 +0000

I’ve noticed this in teaching phonetics too. It’s definitely a characteristic of California English, and is even noted on Wikipedia.

By: Marc van Oostendorp

Marc van Oostendorp — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 10:06:30 +0000

In the Cologne dialect of German, [n]'s have historically turned into [ŋ] after [i:] and other long high vowels. At the same time, these vowels shortened. For instance, [wi:n] (wine) turned into [wiŋ]. Tobias Scheer has written and talked about this at various places; here is a handout of a 1999 talk of his, with many examples (and an interesting mixture of French, German and English).

By: Kevin

Kevin — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 07:54:45 +0000

I should qualify my last post that it only applies to the suffix -ing, not the sequence /ɪŋ/ in general. E.g. “fledgling” has -ɪŋ, not -in. So apparently the suffix has just changed to -in in some dialects.

This business is reminiscent of the tensing of ae before engma which I also have in my dialect (”bang” and “bay” have the same vowel), but the rules (even if ɪŋ > in were a regular rule) cannot be merged: ae (unlike ɪ) also tenses before g and the rule is not sensitive to stress.

By: Kevin

Kevin — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 00:20:20 +0000

I am a speaker (from the midwest) who naturally pronounces the suffix -ing as [-i(:)n] with an alveolar and tense-ish vowel. For example, I pronounce “sailing” and “saline” identically. The final syllables of these words are very different than the final syllable of, e.g., “insulin” or “Colin,” which I say [In]. So -ing seems to have a tense [i] rather than a lax [I]. Of course, this only goes for unstressed syllables: everybody will clearly distinguish bing and bean.

By: ellen broselow

ellen broselow — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 18:45:40 +0000

When I taught at the U. of Washington in Seattle many years ago I noticed that some of the natives pronounced the ‘ing’ suffix as a final alveolar nasal preceded by a high tense vowel. I don’t know how widespread that pronunciation is on the west coast, or whether it is in fact still found. But more generally, I would imagine that speakers for whom a tense/lax contrast is not possible before velar nasal would have a lot of variability in their pronunciations of the vowel in that context.