Further proof that I haven’t lost my mind (yet)

Several years ago (in fact, I think it was 2004), I went to BUCLD with JonW. The BU linguistics club was selling t-shirts that read (approximately) [aj <3 lɪŋgwɪsts].

I almost hesitated to buy one, because of the spelling of “linguists” — I pronounce it as [liŋgwɪsts] (=”[leen]guists”, for my non-IPA-reading friends), whereas the pronunciation on the shirt was [lɪŋgwists] (=”[lynne]guists”).

JonW assure me that I was thoroughly crazy, and that the shirt’s pronunciation was correct.

I am here today to report that I am not, in fact, mad, but that rather this is one of the many features of the California English dialect I have picked up living in the Golden State.

From the Wikipedia page on California English:

I didn’t realize it was possible to pronounce “rang” as [ræŋ], or “king” as [kɪŋ] - in fact, I have to contort my mouth in all sorts of funny ways to make those sounds come out

For more on /ɪ/→[i]/_ŋ, see this Phonoloblog post, or your friendly neighborhood Californian.

6 Responses to “Further proof that I haven’t lost my mind (yet)”

JonW Says:
June 25th, 2007 at 5:41 pm

For the record, you said *I* was crazy, and I was like “oh, that must be part of the front-vowel-tensing-before-ŋ stuff in CaliE.”

And it’s funny, I was talking about this just the other day with someone, but I forget who. I even told them the story about the shirt. But I can’t remember who. Hm.

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Aaron Says:
June 25th, 2007 at 5:45 pm

SuUuUUuUre Jonathan… xP

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frankie Says:
June 25th, 2007 at 9:49 pm

To think, in four years I never noticed your vowel raising. I’d heard it but never pinned it to a region. Me, I have to contort my mouth to get out [liŋ]-anything.

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Josef Fruehwald Says:
July 2nd, 2007 at 11:10 pm

Hey Aaron, Joe Fruehwald here. We met at the Harvard Colloquium, and I just stalked you to over here on your blog because I was bored on facebook.

An interesting thing about tensing before ŋ is how it interacts with ɪŋ~ɪn variation. As mentioned in the Phonoloblog post [in] is a possible variant in some dialect areas for unstressed ɪŋ (not so much here in Philly though). I’ve been told that stylistically, [in] is treated as equivalent to [ɪŋ]. That is to say that [in] varies according to formality of speech the same way that [ɪŋ] does.

I dunno if you already know about the grammatical conditioning of ɪŋ~ɪn variation, in that [ɪŋ] favors gerunds and [ɪn] favors participles and progressives. It’s been suggested that they are two competing morphemes that have been preserved in variable distributions since Old English. Since [in] patterns the same stylistically with [ɪŋ], I would guess that they are phonological variants of one morpheme /-ɪŋ/. So in dialects where all three surface, rather than a three way variation it’s ([ɪŋ]~[in]) ~ /ɪn/ variation.

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Aaron Says:
July 2nd, 2007 at 11:53 pm

Thanks Josef — I wasn’t aware of the grammatical conditioning bit before. Since writing this post, I’ve begun to notice that most of my (same-age) friends from home (an eastern suburb of Los Angeles) use [iŋ] (as I do), but some of the older folks in town (like my ASL prof.) use [in] in the same contexts.

This discussion reminded me, oddly enough, that the character Frank in Donnie Darko has interesting behavior in this regard — near the end of the movie, outside of Roberta Sparrow’s house, Frank yells at Donnie, getting both an [ɪn] and an [in]:

“What were you guys do[ɪn] in the middle of the road, huh? What’re you think[in]?”

(See 7:14 of this video: http://youtube.com/watch?v=mfcepjN08ws )

His pronunciation of think[in] always stuck out to me…

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Tristan McLeay Says:
July 3rd, 2007 at 7:24 am

Josef, I also hadn’t heard of the grammatical conditioning of -ing vs -in before. Cound you point us to some sources which describe it? It sounds quite interesting because, of course, the -g was found only in the OE gerund, not the OE pres. participle.

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