Re: English notation (conclusion?)

dirk elzinga <dirk.elzinga@...> wrote:
>
> > Tom Tadfor Little wrote:
> >
> > Even an average American, who knows as good as nothing about
> > linguistics, would have to realize after some contemplation that the
> > sound in "English" is the same as in "bin": a short, lax /I/.
>
> Not necessarily. Many varieties of Western American English
> (including the one I speak, and presumably the one Tom speaks)
> has front vowel tensing before the velar nasal. This means that
> the vowels in 'peek' and 'pink' are distinguished only by
> nasality: 'pink' has a nasal vowel and 'peek' does not. Likewise
> 'bake' and 'bank'.
    I speak Eastern American English, and the vowels in English, peek, and
pink are the same (although in rapid speech the second vowel in English is
somewhere in between [i] and [I]), as well as the vowels in bake and bank.
(I may be nasalizing the ones before [N] without realizing it.  If so, it's
purely phonetic and not phonemic.)

Christian Thalmann <cinga@...> wrote:
:
: Alright, I have no problem with people claiming that /iN/ is the
: official American pronunciation of <ing> -- that's exactly one of the
: phonetic detail bickerings I feared in my original post.
:
: The fact remains that while the <i> in <ing> may indeed be *phonetically
: realized* as an /i/, it is clearly an allophone of the *phoneme* known
: as "short i", and therefore should be transcribed as <i> rather than
: <ee> in any phonemic transliteration.

    Why "clearly"?  If it hadn't been for this list it would never would
have occurred to me that it could be anything other than /i/.  I still have
trouble imagining an English speaker using different vowels for "scene" and
"sing", although I know from discussions on this list that it's more common
than not.  Still, if some dialects always have [IN] and never have [iN],
while other dialects always have [iN] and never have [IN], then how can the
underlying phoneme be clearly one or the other?
    Actually, after I wrote the above and before I sent it, I realized that
there is evidence for what you say.  When a [iN] speaker is speaking
rapidly and the [N] changes to an [n], the [i] changes to an [I] with it.
So I will say [kI siN] or [kI sIn] for kissing.

 ===========================================================================

             Dennis Paul Himes    <>    dennis@himes.connix.com
                  http://www.connix.com/~dennis/dennis.htm

Disclaimer: "True, I talk of dreams; which are the children of an idle
brain, begot of nothing but vain fantasy; which is as thin of substance as
the air."                      - Romeo & Juliet, Act I Scene iv Verse 96-99