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I had a friend who was very thorough and insisted on pronouncing the g at the end of -ing words. I took college linguistics and remember this table. I tried to

I had a friend who was very thorough and insisted on pronouncing the g at the end of -ing words. I took college linguistics and remember this table. I tried to explain to her that "ng" may be spelled as two letters but, like sh and ch, is really a single consonant, and linguists give it its own name (the velar nasal) and its own singular symbol (ŋ). Sometimes we clip the g, and say goin'. Then there is the standard way to say it, goiŋ. Then there is the way she was saying it, goiŋ-guh. I find it fascinating that languages have different sets of sounds. For example, in English p and b are two different letters, and pat and bat are two different words. But other languages don't distinguish them, and their speakers really wouldn't notice a difference if you said pat or bat. On the other hand, I don't hear the difference between p at the beginning of word, like pat, and p at the end of a word, like stop. But one is "aspirated" and one isn't, and in some languages they are different letters, so pat and pʰat could be two different words. The only difference is a puff of air following one and not the other. They say in the babble of babies you can hear all the consonants of the world, but as we take on our mother tongue we lose the ability to hear or say many of them.

thewarpaint 7y ago
By any chance, was your friend Italian? I distinctly remember some Italian speakers I've met pronouncing it exactly like that, "goiŋ-guh". Probably because they're used to most words ending in a vowel.
- combatentropy 7y ago
  No, she was from a small southern town. She wasn't trying to pronounce the final vowel, just the final g. But it's impossible to say a full g without a small uh sound. It was slight, like a pop. The irony is, she tried so hard to say the g without making too much of it, that she often removed its voice. The unvoiced g is k. So, most of the time she ended up saying goink.
  - skrebbel 7y ago
    > No, she was from a small southern town. Southern where? So far I've able to deduct not Italy, probably native English speaking, somewhere south. So South Africa? But then why be cryptic about it?
    - atorodius 7y ago
      parent probably meant southern US
    - combatentropy 7y ago
      Sorry, I meant the southern United States. What is the term for when you're talking on the Internet and forget that you might be talking to someone halfway around the world?
kragen 7y ago
Interestingly, although we think of [iŋ] as the standard pronunciation and [in] or [In] as low-prestige nonstandard variants, careful transcription reveals the alveolar variants frequently in even high-prestige dialects.
- Bud 7y ago
  [ɪŋ] is actually standard. Short i. (former graduate school singers' diction teacher, and current professional classical singer, here. IPA is a key tool of the trade.)
  - kragen 7y ago
    You're right! But the whole truth is more complicated. I speak a US dialect where [iŋ] is a standard pronunciation, as mentioned in https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-ing#Pronunciation https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-ing#Pronunciation and more obliquely in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_English_vowels#Tense%E2%80%93lax_neutralization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_Englis..., but in other dialects (especially RP) [ɪŋ] and [ɪn] are the standard pronunciations and [iŋ] and [in] are not. There's a fairly comprehensive exploration of the vowel-quality-alternation question in https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3037 https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3037 if you're interested. From the summary: As I mentioned, it's part of the folklore of sociolinguistics that the [in] pronunciation exists, and that it's (apparently) not stigmatized in the way that the [ɪn] pronunciation is, and that in fact it may be heard as [ɪŋ] or [iŋ] and even transcribed that way in some studies. As for singing diction, singing diction is prejudiced against high vowels (like [i]) to a sometimes absurd degree; you often hear the “-ing” suffix pronounced [ɛn] in popular music, because it lowers the vowel and thus increases the volume. The surprising thing is that this lowering is obvious to me, even though my dialect has the pin–pen merger, which would normally neutralize that contrast. A similar lowering transformation lowers things like "baby" [beɪbi] to the outlandish [beɪbɛ]. When I was a kid, this bothered me a lot. Now I no longer think there's anything wrong with it, but I think it's strong evidence that singing pronunciation has important differences from spoken pronunciation. There was a Language Log post on a student project analyzing differences in the same speaker's language between musical performances and interviews, focusing in particular on the alternation between [ɪn] and [ɪŋ], at https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3687 https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3687. There's some good discussion in the comment thread there about how sung pronunciations often reflect not only the exigencies of singing to project (perhaps more important before microphones, but still practiced today) but also musical-genre-specific diction traditions. Some discussion also ensues about the [i]/[ɪ] alternation.
stan_rogers 7y ago
There are English dialects where the "g" sound is present - especially in the Northwest of England (think Mancunian, like Brian Cox, or Liverpudlian, like the Beatles in full-Scouse, lovable mop-tops mode). It's also prevalent among Yiddish-influenced speakers in the US (although that's mostly died out now).
- wirrbel 7y ago
  It even makes sense, because you do pronounce the g in words like "finger", it just becomes silent at the end of the word. In German "ng" is always without a distinct g-sound (like German "Finger", or its n and g like "Ungeheuer")
  - lqet 7y ago
    > In German "ng" is always without a distinct g-sound (like German "Finger", or its n and g like "Ungeheuer") Depends on the dialect. For example, older speakers of Swabian may totally say "Feng-ger" to "Finger", as opposed to the more "modern" Swabian variant of "Fenger".
  - petecox 7y ago
    Wikipedia calls it 'ng coalescence'. "This means that the words finger and singer do not rhyme in most modern varieties of English, although they did in Middle English." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_English_consonant_clusters#NG-coalescence https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_Engl...
  - rootbear 7y ago
    My chorus director in college was always trying to get us to not use the /g/ when singing German. He often used the finger/singer analogy to explain the difference.
- bgeeek 7y ago
  I would say it is used everywhere in the UK, more so in the midlands - try the Birmingham accent.
- 7y ago
mason55 7y ago
My wife is from Long Island and when she drinks she starts pronouncing the final g if the next word starts with a vowel. She becomes from “Lon gisland” and is planning on “goin gout” later.
- fortran77 7y ago
  Ha! I grew up on Long Island and was wondering why the Wikipedia say that "finger" and "singer" no longer rhyme in American Engish when I pronounce them exactly the same. It's because I learned most of my English on Lon Gisland! (My accent is odd because I was born in Brooklyn and we spoke Yiddish at home, grew up on "Lon Gisland" then did college and beyond in Israel, and now spend about 2/3rd of time in US and 1/3 in Israel)
  - OnlyOneCannolo 7y ago
    I had an experience like this learning about rhyming words in school when I was little. "Hog", "log", and "bog" all rhymed, buy we couldn't figure out (not even the teacher) why "dog" (dowg?) sounded so much different. I was telling this story as a teenager when it suddenly occurred to me that I had a very strong accent.
- rolltiide 7y ago
  Ha, have heard the lon gisland from sober people from long island, at least I think they were sober but I always wonder whats wrong with them everything east of bushwick till the hamptons triggers me
- souterrain 7y ago
  Is there a linguistic name for this returning to the pronunciation or accent of your youth when drinking or around others with the same/similar accent? I am also from Long Island, and have largely moderated my pronunciation to match a more standard pronunciation, but when I interact with natives of north Jersey, parts of NYC and Long Island, I somehow start adopting the accent a bit, unconsciously.
  - 7y ago
thaumasiotes 7y ago
> I find it fascinating that languages have different sets of sounds. For example, in English p and b are two different letters, and pat and bat are two different words. But other languages don't distinguish them, and their speakers really wouldn't notice a difference if you said pat or bat. This is related to a question I've been wondering about for a long time. One of the first stages in language processing is converting a sound's raw physical waveform into a sequence of phoneme tokens. Different languages divide different sounds differently -- as you note, [p] and [b] are distinct in many languages, but not all of them. What I'd like to know is how nonexistent sounds get classified. Take [θ], the thorn sound. It is rare, but physically similar to several other common sounds -- the stop at the same place of articulation would be [t̪], the closest nearby tongue-based fricative is [s], and [f], while not tongue-based, is even more similar. All of those are attested substitutions for the difficult [θ] sound. And they appear to be predictable -- English-speaking babies reliably substitute /f/, which they can pronounce, for /θ/, which they can't. Mandarin speakers hear /θ/ as /s/. Cantonese speakers hear it as /f/. (As, I believe, do Russian speakers.) In Ireland, the sound is replaced by some kind of /t/. But all of the languages I just mentioned offer the full set of /f/, /s/, and /t/ as available options. To a certain degree this is conventionalized. I'd believe that modern Irish pronunciation is based more on what you hear from other Irish people than on a difficulty with thorn. And in English, the Mandarin sound /tɕʰ/ has sometimes been recorded as "ts" and sometimes as "ch", and if you pronounce it to untrained listeners and ask them what they heard, you'll get a mix of both answers. (Today it is less helpfully spelled "q".) But nobody trains babies that if they can't produce a correct /θ/, the proper thing to do is to fall back on /f/, because /s/ would be a faux pas. The babies just do their best, and they all independently agree that their best approximation to /θ/ is /f/. I think it should be possible, if you know the phonology of a language, to determine which phoneme (or possibly phonemes) a particular foreign sound would be understood as by a speaker of that language. As things stand today, it isn't -- we know that different languages will cause the same sound to be heard differently, and we know experimentally what the likely options are for a given sound, but we can't predict an individual mapping. And there's enough consistency in what people hear that we _should_ be able to do that.
- fortran77 7y ago
  B and V switch around in many Spanish dialects, and also often in Hebrew where they are represented with the same letter "ב". (Also P and F, etc.)
Ihfhcub 7y ago
The Korean alphabet has it's own letter for ng "ㅇ" Example https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/%EB%B0%A9 https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/%EB%B0%A9
- interfixus 7y ago
  The Korean alphabet is a thing of beauty. It could more or less be the international phonetic alphabet.
  - bmn__ 7y ago
    No, it's far too limited to map all phonemes.
wodenokoto 7y ago
I thought B and P were differentiated by the aspiration
- mantap 7y ago
  You can do an experiment to find out. Try saying "spa" and "sba". In English plosives are not aspirated after an S. So if the only difference is aspiration then it should sound exactly the same.
  - dspig 7y ago
    At least for me, P has an extra pop of air so sounds slightly different
  - wodenokoto 7y ago
    I’m inclined to change the vowel sound in sba compared to spa, but I’m pretty sure the consonant sound is the same.
- jdmichal 7y ago
  It's not aspiration, but rather the delay in onset of voicing. /b/ begins voicing before release, /p/ begins very close to release, and /pʰ/ begins after release. You might also be thinking about the fact that, where English speakers would use /pʰ/, they tend to hear /p/ as /b/. So while an English speaker would say <pat> as /pʰat/, they will hear /pat/ as <bat>.
  - kragen 7y ago
    Right, /p/ in positions where it is contrastive with /b/ is distinguished by both voicing and aspiration. So if someone says [pæt] instead of [pʰæt], those two features are out of sync; the listener can either error-correct it to [bæt] or to [pʰæt]. (And this is why "b" is used in hanyu pinyin to represent unaspirated [p], and analogously "d" for unaspirated [t].)

thewarpaint 7y ago

By any chance, was your friend Italian? I distinctly remember some Italian speakers I've met pronouncing it exactly like that, "goiŋ-guh". Probably because they're used to most words ending in a vowel.

combatentropy 7y ago
No, she was from a small southern town. She wasn't trying to pronounce the final vowel, just the final g. But it's impossible to say a full g without a small uh sound. It was slight, like a pop. The irony is, she tried so hard to say the g without making too much of it, that she often removed its voice. The unvoiced g is k. So, most of the time she ended up saying goink.
- skrebbel 7y ago
  > No, she was from a small southern town. Southern where? So far I've able to deduct not Italy, probably native English speaking, somewhere south. So South Africa? But then why be cryptic about it?
  - atorodius 7y ago
    parent probably meant southern US
  - combatentropy 7y ago
    Sorry, I meant the southern United States. What is the term for when you're talking on the Internet and forget that you might be talking to someone halfway around the world?

kragen 7y ago

Interestingly, although we think of [iŋ] as the standard pronunciation and [in] or [In] as low-prestige nonstandard variants, careful transcription reveals the alveolar variants frequently in even high-prestige dialects.

Bud 7y ago
[ɪŋ] is actually standard. Short i. (former graduate school singers' diction teacher, and current professional classical singer, here. IPA is a key tool of the trade.)
- kragen 7y ago
  You're right! But the whole truth is more complicated. I speak a US dialect where [iŋ] is a standard pronunciation, as mentioned in https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-ing#Pronunciation https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-ing#Pronunciation and more obliquely in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_English_vowels#Tense%E2%80%93lax_neutralization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_Englis..., but in other dialects (especially RP) [ɪŋ] and [ɪn] are the standard pronunciations and [iŋ] and [in] are not. There's a fairly comprehensive exploration of the vowel-quality-alternation question in https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3037 https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3037 if you're interested. From the summary: As I mentioned, it's part of the folklore of sociolinguistics that the [in] pronunciation exists, and that it's (apparently) not stigmatized in the way that the [ɪn] pronunciation is, and that in fact it may be heard as [ɪŋ] or [iŋ] and even transcribed that way in some studies. As for singing diction, singing diction is prejudiced against high vowels (like [i]) to a sometimes absurd degree; you often hear the “-ing” suffix pronounced [ɛn] in popular music, because it lowers the vowel and thus increases the volume. The surprising thing is that this lowering is obvious to me, even though my dialect has the pin–pen merger, which would normally neutralize that contrast. A similar lowering transformation lowers things like "baby" [beɪbi] to the outlandish [beɪbɛ]. When I was a kid, this bothered me a lot. Now I no longer think there's anything wrong with it, but I think it's strong evidence that singing pronunciation has important differences from spoken pronunciation. There was a Language Log post on a student project analyzing differences in the same speaker's language between musical performances and interviews, focusing in particular on the alternation between [ɪn] and [ɪŋ], at https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3687 https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3687. There's some good discussion in the comment thread there about how sung pronunciations often reflect not only the exigencies of singing to project (perhaps more important before microphones, but still practiced today) but also musical-genre-specific diction traditions. Some discussion also ensues about the [i]/[ɪ] alternation.

stan_rogers 7y ago

There are English dialects where the "g" sound is present - especially in the Northwest of England (think Mancunian, like Brian Cox, or Liverpudlian, like the Beatles in full-Scouse, lovable mop-tops mode). It's also prevalent among Yiddish-influenced speakers in the US (although that's mostly died out now).

wirrbel 7y ago
It even makes sense, because you do pronounce the g in words like "finger", it just becomes silent at the end of the word. In German "ng" is always without a distinct g-sound (like German "Finger", or its n and g like "Ungeheuer")
- lqet 7y ago
  > In German "ng" is always without a distinct g-sound (like German "Finger", or its n and g like "Ungeheuer") Depends on the dialect. For example, older speakers of Swabian may totally say "Feng-ger" to "Finger", as opposed to the more "modern" Swabian variant of "Fenger".
- petecox 7y ago
  Wikipedia calls it 'ng coalescence'. "This means that the words finger and singer do not rhyme in most modern varieties of English, although they did in Middle English." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_English_consonant_clusters#NG-coalescence https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_Engl...
- rootbear 7y ago
  My chorus director in college was always trying to get us to not use the /g/ when singing German. He often used the finger/singer analogy to explain the difference.
bgeeek 7y ago
I would say it is used everywhere in the UK, more so in the midlands - try the Birmingham accent.
7y ago

mason55 7y ago

My wife is from Long Island and when she drinks she starts pronouncing the final g if the next word starts with a vowel. She becomes from “Lon gisland” and is planning on “goin gout” later.

fortran77 7y ago
Ha! I grew up on Long Island and was wondering why the Wikipedia say that "finger" and "singer" no longer rhyme in American Engish when I pronounce them exactly the same. It's because I learned most of my English on Lon Gisland! (My accent is odd because I was born in Brooklyn and we spoke Yiddish at home, grew up on "Lon Gisland" then did college and beyond in Israel, and now spend about 2/3rd of time in US and 1/3 in Israel)
- OnlyOneCannolo 7y ago
  I had an experience like this learning about rhyming words in school when I was little. "Hog", "log", and "bog" all rhymed, buy we couldn't figure out (not even the teacher) why "dog" (dowg?) sounded so much different. I was telling this story as a teenager when it suddenly occurred to me that I had a very strong accent.
rolltiide 7y ago
Ha, have heard the lon gisland from sober people from long island, at least I think they were sober but I always wonder whats wrong with them everything east of bushwick till the hamptons triggers me
souterrain 7y ago
Is there a linguistic name for this returning to the pronunciation or accent of your youth when drinking or around others with the same/similar accent? I am also from Long Island, and have largely moderated my pronunciation to match a more standard pronunciation, but when I interact with natives of north Jersey, parts of NYC and Long Island, I somehow start adopting the accent a bit, unconsciously.
- 7y ago

thaumasiotes 7y ago

> I find it fascinating that languages have different sets of sounds. For example, in English p and b are two different letters, and pat and bat are two different words. But other languages don't distinguish them, and their speakers really wouldn't notice a difference if you said pat or bat. This is related to a question I've been wondering about for a long time. One of the first stages in language processing is converting a sound's raw physical waveform into a sequence of phoneme tokens. Different languages divide different sounds differently -- as you note, [p] and [b] are distinct in many languages, but not all of them. What I'd like to know is how nonexistent sounds get classified. Take [θ], the thorn sound. It is rare, but physically similar to several other common sounds -- the stop at the same place of articulation would be [t̪], the closest nearby tongue-based fricative is [s], and [f], while not tongue-based, is even more similar. All of those are attested substitutions for the difficult [θ] sound. And they appear to be predictable -- English-speaking babies reliably substitute /f/, which they can pronounce, for /θ/, which they can't. Mandarin speakers hear /θ/ as /s/. Cantonese speakers hear it as /f/. (As, I believe, do Russian speakers.) In Ireland, the sound is replaced by some kind of /t/. But all of the languages I just mentioned offer the full set of /f/, /s/, and /t/ as available options. To a certain degree this is conventionalized. I'd believe that modern Irish pronunciation is based more on what you hear from other Irish people than on a difficulty with thorn. And in English, the Mandarin sound /tɕʰ/ has sometimes been recorded as "ts" and sometimes as "ch", and if you pronounce it to untrained listeners and ask them what they heard, you'll get a mix of both answers. (Today it is less helpfully spelled "q".) But nobody trains babies that if they can't produce a correct /θ/, the proper thing to do is to fall back on /f/, because /s/ would be a faux pas. The babies just do their best, and they all independently agree that their best approximation to /θ/ is /f/. I think it should be possible, if you know the phonology of a language, to determine which phoneme (or possibly phonemes) a particular foreign sound would be understood as by a speaker of that language. As things stand today, it isn't -- we know that different languages will cause the same sound to be heard differently, and we know experimentally what the likely options are for a given sound, but we can't predict an individual mapping. And there's enough consistency in what people hear that we _should_ be able to do that.

fortran77 7y ago
B and V switch around in many Spanish dialects, and also often in Hebrew where they are represented with the same letter "ב". (Also P and F, etc.)

Ihfhcub 7y ago

The Korean alphabet has it's own letter for ng "ㅇ" Example https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/%EB%B0%A9 https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/%EB%B0%A9

interfixus 7y ago
The Korean alphabet is a thing of beauty. It could more or less be the international phonetic alphabet.
- bmn__ 7y ago
  No, it's far too limited to map all phonemes.

wodenokoto 7y ago

I thought B and P were differentiated by the aspiration

mantap 7y ago
You can do an experiment to find out. Try saying "spa" and "sba". In English plosives are not aspirated after an S. So if the only difference is aspiration then it should sound exactly the same.
- dspig 7y ago
  At least for me, P has an extra pop of air so sounds slightly different
- wodenokoto 7y ago
  I’m inclined to change the vowel sound in sba compared to spa, but I’m pretty sure the consonant sound is the same.
jdmichal 7y ago
It's not aspiration, but rather the delay in onset of voicing. /b/ begins voicing before release, /p/ begins very close to release, and /pʰ/ begins after release. You might also be thinking about the fact that, where English speakers would use /pʰ/, they tend to hear /p/ as /b/. So while an English speaker would say <pat> as /pʰat/, they will hear /pat/ as <bat>.
- kragen 7y ago
  Right, /p/ in positions where it is contrastive with /b/ is distinguished by both voicing and aspiration. So if someone says [pæt] instead of [pʰæt], those two features are out of sync; the listener can either error-correct it to [bæt] or to [pʰæt]. (And this is why "b" is used in hanyu pinyin to represent unaspirated [p], and analogously "d" for unaspirated [t].)