USAGE: English [N] (was: mu for [N])

On Saturday, January 22, 2005, at 07:24 , Philip Newton wrote:

> On Fri, 21 Jan 2005 18:48:33 +0000, Ray Brown <ray.brown@...>
> wrote:
>> not all varieties of English have phonemic /N/;
>
> Eh? There are varieties where "bang" and "ban" are homophonic?
Where did I say that!!

In those dialects _bang_ is pronounced [baNg], which in (those dialects)
is *phonemically* /bang/. Nor is this a spelling pronunciation; it is just
the older pronunciation which has given way to [baN] or [b&N] in most
modern dialects, including mine.

Indeed, I have come across phonemic analyses of English which regard the
[N] in [siN] as the surface realization of phonemic /sing/. Indeed, if all
suffixes behaved like the -er and -est of 'longer' and 'longest', this
would be plausible. Unfortunately the _singer_ ~ _finger_ contrast of most
dialects makes such analyses a little tricky.

[snip]
> And a lot of people have difficulty understanding "'ng' as in
> 'singer', not as in 'finger'".
..and where _sing_ is pronounced [siNg], there is no difference  :)
=======================================================

On Saturday, January 22, 2005, at 07:47 , Chris Bates wrote:

> And a lot of people have difficulty understanding "'ng' as in
> 'singer', not as in 'finger'".
>
>
>
> I know people who have /Ng/ in the middle of singer. :)
Yep - quite so. I do also.

> I don't
> though.... for me singer has only N in the middle.
Yes, that's how I say it also. The phonemic status of [N] in English is
one of those things that phonologists like to argue about (see above). It
has, for example, been pointed out more than once that [N] and [h] are in
complementary distribution (at least in RP), so should that not mean,
according to the phoneme theory, they are positional variants of the same
phoneme?

I hasten to add, I do not accept that analysis   :)

Ray
=======================================================
http://home.freeuk.com/ray.brown
ray.brown@freeuk.com
=======================================================
"If /ni/ can change into /A/, then practically anything
can change into anything"
          Yuen Ren Chao, 'Language and Symbolic Systems"

Reply