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Pronunciation of tongue?
"Tongue" seems to be pronounced in one of two ways, both in Britain and N America. There are those who, like myself pronounce it with an "o" sound- tong, and those that pronouce it with a "u" sound- tung.
I have only just thought about this so I'm not sure where the differences occur, but "tong" tends to be more prevalent around New York and in N England (Lou Reed rhymes "tongue" with "thong" in Venus in Furs) and "tung" everywhere else.
How do you pronounce the words and where are you from?
Actually listening again I think Lou Reed actually says "tung".
Definitely "tung" in my estimation. Born and raised in Miami, Florida, USA :)
There is a Glasgow Gang called the 'Tongs'
What a pleasant place with an interesting culture.
Glasgow’s gangs - the Toi, Fleet, Cumbie, Tong, Govan Team, Derry, Pak et al, names reaching back 200 years into a violent past - have entered the 21st century, creating their own websites with chatrooms where threats of death and violence are thrown out at the click of a mouse.
Some interesting new words for you....
Jamie C, a member of the Gorbals team, explained: "The main people we fight with are the Brig’ton [Bridgeton] team, but the Gorbals will fight with every c***!"
On the web, they adopt a vernacular speaking style, and insane poetry, such as Johnny’s, is prevalent in sites such as the Maryhill Fleeto Mad Sqwad which promises that it will be "Slashin’ jaws; kickin baws; puntin’ jellies [temazepam] and stabbin’ bellies".
Not called "Tim" by any chance.......
GANGS have fought over their turf in and around Glasgow since the 1700s, when factions from north and south of the Clyde battled on an island lying between Calton and Gorbals.
It would be another 100 years before the gangs made headlines with the formation in the East End of the Protestant Calton San Toy, a name that survives today as Toi. Their enemy was the Catholic Tim Malloys (slang for Bhoys). A Glasgow Catholic is still known as a Tim.
In the Sixties, they were the scourge of inner-city slums and the relatively new peripheral schemes such as Castlemilk, Drumchapel and Easterhouse. "Tongs, ya bass," became Glasgow’s unofficial motto, but while many thought "bass" was short for bastard, it was, in fact, a corruption of the ancient Gaelic expression for "battle and die".
Some more new words .....
The media presented Britain with images of youths discarding "chibs" - bladed weapons - unaware that minutes before they had probably been filched from their mothers’ kitchen drawers.
Customised expressions used by the gangs include:
"plunge" - stab;
"puntin’" - . sell drugs;
"sumbuzz" - excitement;
"buckets" - pipe for smoking cannabis;
"heavystunna" - good looking girl;
"ho" - tart, as the expression applied to women;
"M8" - mate;
"mukka" - friend;
"shoutoot" - message to friends and allies;
"burdz" - girlfriends;
"skeem" - a gang turf;
"jiggy" - the dancing;
"swatch" - . take a look;
"rapid c****" - gang members who run from fights.
On the BBC, the British newsreaders tend to use [O] for the first syllables of such words as: tongue, money, company, one, onion...
...where most Britons would use a [V]. i.e. pronounce those words as "tung", "munny", "cumpany", "wun", "unnion".
I would say "tOng", "munny" "cumpany", "wOn", "unnion"
The following is my pronunciations of such words.
tongue /tVN/
money /'mVni/
company /'kVmp@ni/
won /wVn/
onion /'Vnj@n/
I seem to use /V/ for all of these words. Where are you from, Rick Johnson?
<<I have only just thought about this so I'm not sure where the differences occur, but "tong" tends to be more prevalent around New York and in N England (Lou Reed rhymes "tongue" with "thong" in Venus in Furs) and "tung" everywhere else.>>
Do you mean New England or Northern England? I'm from New England and I pronounce "tongue" as ["t_hVN] ("tung"). I've never been aware that there was any variation in the pronunciation of "tongue" in North America.
Interesting, I didn't know that this word could be pronounced differently. The General American pronunciation is [tVN] I believe.
Tung -- American. Never heard it pronounced any other way in the US.
Brennus, I know this has got to be the hundredth time I've said this, but you *need* to learn X-SAMPA if you want anyone to have a clue what vowel you're trying to represent. I really don't know what phoneme you're trying to represent with "oh". X-SAMPA is a simple, one-to-one conversion of IPA to ASCII text, and it's not that hard to learn. Just go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-SAMPA .
Lazar,
Re: "Brennus, I know this has got to be the hundredth time I've said this, but you *need* to learn X-SAMPA ..."
Bear with me, here is my answer:
First of all, did you notice that even the author of this post, Rick Johnson, himself did not use X-Sampa? Have you addressed him about it?
Secondly, You may like X-Sampa and be able to read it but that does not hold true for most of our readers. What's more, most of them cannot read the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) either which is actually a little easier to learn than X-Sampa. But if you really want to communicate with them, you have to take these things into consideration too.
I have personal friends who are linguists of sorts who cannot read IPA or X-Sampa. Yet, they are still not dumb. Some of them are more intelligent than I am in certain respects.
For this forum, I prefer to use a pronunciation based on traditional English spelling similar to that used by "World Book Encyclopedia", most dictionaries and even most phrase books and travel guides for tourists. I think most people can read it . I'm sure you can really read it too. Most of us are introduced to it early on in our grade school "Weekly Readers" or whatever the equivalent classroom magazine is.
Ideally, I would prefer to use the IPA but I don't have a keyboard or the software for it. I think very few people have. Then there would still be the problem of 75 to 80% of the people on this forum not being able to read it.
In conclusion, I think that the WOB type transcription works fine for most readers. While I still respect X-Sampa, I'd rather not use it and I think that you, Kirk and Travis are limiting yourselves by insisting on using it.
Take Care,
Brennus.
I don't want to sound childish, but I think that on the contrary, you're limiting yourself by insisting on not using X-SAMPA. (You could at least give X-SAMPA alongside the non-scientific transcription.) There's a huge amount of really important dialectal variation that simply *cannot* be represented using traditional English respelling, so the transcriptions that you give can be completely ambiguous. For instance, by "poh-blick", I honestly don't know if you're trying to say [pQblIk], [po:blIk], or [p@UblIk].
<<First of all, did you notice that even the author of this post, Rick Johnson, himself did not use X-Sampa? Have you addressed him about it?>>
Yes, I did notice. But the thing is, he asked a very simple question about whether word "A" rhymes with word-class "X" or word-class "Y". Questions like this can be asked unambiguously without any transcription at all. But you seem to have a strong interest in dialectal phonology, and I think you're really doing yourself a disservice by not using X-SAMPA at least some of the time.
<<For this forum, I prefer to use a pronunciation based on traditional English spelling similar to that used by "World Book Encyclopedia", most dictionaries and even most phrase books and travel guides for tourists.>>
But even most dictionaries without IPA tend to use a somewhat complex (and often quite different) systems with non-intuitive diacritics and letter-doubling - requiring a key at the beginning of the dictionary in order to read properly.
You treat the non-IPA dictionary pronunciation schemes as if they are one unified system that can be understood by everybody, but this page ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style_(pronunciation)/IPA_vs._other_pronunciation_symbols ) demonstrates the huge diversity, and the resultant ambiguity, among dictionary phonetic systems.
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