"ing" pronounced as "ink"

Franco   Thu Mar 15, 2007 9:01 am GMT
I have been granted the great discomfort of chancing apon this rather bewildering and to an extent cumbersome to my understanding utterance on the odd ocasion.

Why do some people pronounce 'ing' as 'ink'? I'm thinkink, I'm goink, winnik etc etc.

Is this a dialectic, preference, or uneducated thing? How can this most inexplicable phenomenon be explicated?

Make me more hefty intellectually. I charge you!
Guest   Thu Mar 15, 2007 9:37 am GMT
Some actually pronounce the 'g' sound as a consonant. So instead of a purely nasal [IN] they pronounce it [INg]. You perceive this as [INk].
Jim   Fri Mar 16, 2007 7:39 am GMT
I disagree. I don't reckon that to distinquish [INg] from [INk] is that difficult: they sound distingt to me. The [INg] pronunciation seems to be somethink which is found in dialects of certain parts of Encland. I've heard [INk] in Australia it was definitely an [INk]. That said though, I'm not sure that I've got the explication of this phenomenon for you. Perhaps it's a simplification: one fewer phoneme to distinquish.

By the way, it would seem you've got your "instead of" the wronk way round: it was /ng/ which gave rise to /N/.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ng_coalescence#Ng-coalescence
Guest   Fri Mar 16, 2007 8:26 am GMT
It just seems that, at times, there is such a fine difference between 'ink' and 'ing'.

If you pronounce the 'g' in 'ing' quickly enough it comes off as 'k'. But sustained for long enough so it gets voiced properly, it does comes out as a 'g'.
Guest   Fri Mar 16, 2007 8:42 am GMT
I should mention that my experience is based on a friend's pronunciation of 'something' which sounds like 'somethink' to the untrained ear. But he does distinguish 'ink' and 'ing'. It's just that the 'g' consonant, which isn't typically pronounced, throws the unsuspecting listener off.
Guest   Fri Mar 16, 2007 9:08 am GMT
>>By the way, it would seem you've got your "instead of" the wronk way round: it was /ng/ which gave rise to /N/.<<

Oh and I didn't mean to imply anything historical by "instead", just that the /Ng/ for a word ending is a rarity compared to /N/.
Lazar   Fri Mar 16, 2007 3:06 pm GMT
<<Some actually pronounce the 'g' sound as a consonant. So instead of a purely nasal [IN] they pronounce it [INg]. You perceive this as [INk].>>

I agree with this; but I would add that for some accents it may be even more than a matter of wrong perception: I've read that in Estuary English it is in fact common to pronounce "something" as ["s6mTINk].
Guest   Sat Mar 17, 2007 2:35 am GMT
Yep, I didn't have the Estuary "sumfink" pronunciation in mind. It's not an accent I come in contact with.
Rick Johnson   Sat Mar 17, 2007 10:07 pm GMT
<<I've read that in Estuary English it is in fact common to pronounce "something" as ["s6mTINk].>>

I would actually go as far as to say that more commonly the "th" sound in something is pronounced as an "f". However, I have heard teenagers from London on TV and they sound almost Jamaican, so s6mTINK may becoming more common.
Buddhaheart   Sun Mar 18, 2007 4:49 am GMT
This discussion brings up a question I’ve: Do any of you pronounce THANKS with the [N] /T{Nks/ or without /T{nks/?
Lazar   Sun Mar 18, 2007 7:14 am GMT
<<Do any of you pronounce THANKS with the [N] /T{Nks/ or without /T{nks/?>>

I'm sorry, but I don't understand your question. Are you talking about phonemics, or phonetics?
Buddhaheart   Sun Mar 18, 2007 4:39 pm GMT
<<I'm sorry, but I don't understand your question. Are you talking about phonemics, orphonetics?>>

Thank you for your query.

What I’m trying to find out is I notice a lots of people don’t seem to utter phonetically the word with the “ng” sound for the consonant “n”, loosely transcribed as [T{nks]? If my perception is correct, I want to know why. I am also interested in how people in other parts of the world look at this phenomenon.
Lazar   Sun Mar 18, 2007 5:35 pm GMT
<<What I’m trying to find out is I notice a lots of people don’t seem to utter phonetically the word with the “ng” sound for the consonant “n”, loosely transcribed as [T{nks]? If my perception is correct, I want to know why. I am also interested in how people in other parts of the world look at this phenomenon.>>

I've never noticed this phenomenon. I would find it really awkward to say ["T{nks], with an alveolar-to-velar transition, and I think the natural inclination would be to use [N].
Josh Lalonde   Sun Mar 18, 2007 7:42 pm GMT
Yeah, I think all native English speakers would tend to say [Nk] for /nk/. I find it really hard to actually pronounce [nk]; even languages that dont have a /N/ phoneme tend to produce it in /nk/ situations (eg. French).
Guest   Mon Mar 19, 2007 12:03 am GMT
That implies that in French you could have [O~k] or [ONk] for "onc".

So then what's the different between [I~k] and [INk] for transcribing "ink"? They would sound the same to me.