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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).

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")

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_Engl...

> 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".

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.

I would say it is used everywhere in the UK, more so in the midlands - try the Birmingham accent.

Not in word-final position, no, except (as noted by some commenters) through liaison with an initial vowel in the following word — an "intrusive g" phenomenon similar to the "intrusive r" found in many non-rhotic dialects.

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.

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

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)

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.

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.

I don’t know the name for the transition, but you are talking about what are called registers in linguistics. (I do the same thing when back with old friends)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Register_(sociolinguistics)

Also see code-switching. Which is something I have been very amused to find myself doing after moving back home to New Orleans - there's several distinct flavors of English in that city, and watching them pop out of my mouth after twenty five years speaking Newscaster English is fun.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code-switching

This is a form of [code switching.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code-switching)

It’s most commonly found with African Americans and minority/immigrant communities, since in professional or unknown settings people will use more standard registers of English.

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.

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.

> 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?

parent probably meant southern US

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?

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.

[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.)

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 and more obliquely in 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 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. 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.

I followed the rabbit hole a bit further and found http://dedalvs.free.fr/writing/dpetersoncomps.pdf and https://literalminded.wordpress.com/2008/09/02/engma-enigma/, which cover the vowel-quality question in more detail.

The Korean alphabet has it's own letter for ng

"ㅇ"

Example https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/%EB%B0%A9

The Korean alphabet is a thing of beauty. It could more or less be the international phonetic alphabet.

No, it's far too limited to map all phonemes.

> 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.

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.)

Sure, every language collapses multiple sounds into unified phonemes. In modern Mandarin, [v] is a kind of /w/. In Old English, [v] was a kind of /f/.

But that's a little different from what I asked about. These correspondences can be learned directly -- a child growing up to speak Old English would have known to treat [v] as a form of /f/ because he would have heard [v] all the time, as a form of /f/. The language had an explicit opinion, and [v] was a common sound.

But that isn't the case for foreign sounds. A child growing up in a Mandarin-speaking environment will never hear [θ] at all. Instead, the correspondence of [θ] to /s/ is an implicit rule, driven by the rules that actually do exist. I want to use the explicit rules, like [v] = /w/, to predict the implicit ones, like [θ] = /s/.

To add to your note about dental fricatives.

Arabic has separate consonants for /ð/ (ذ) and /z/ (ز). But it also has a consonant ظ that can be pronounced as either /ðˤ/ or /zˤ/. For me as an English speaker trying to learn Arabic it was confusing because /ðˤ/ and /zˤ/ don't sound the same at all, but evidently to Arabic speakers they do and the pharyngealization makes all the difference.

Malay/Indonesian also turns fricatives into sibilants. So /θ/ becomes /s/ e.g. ath-thulathaa /aθ-θulaθa:ʔ/ (الثلاثاء) becomes Selasa. /ð/ would become a /z/ but that sound isn't native to most languages in that part of the world either, so it can become all kinds of sounds including /dʒ/ and even /l/!

Be careful to distinguish borrowings and substitutions. They are not the same.

Contemporary Indonesians substitute /ts/ for Arabic /θ/ if they have only so-so Arabic pronunciation. But this is on the basis of the contemporary transliteration of Arabic. Indonesians do not have the English speakers' concept of spelling - only transcription. In English, they're more likely to use /t d/ but sufficiently many people who speak English have learnt proper Arabic in school that they can pronounce the English sounds.

The use of /s/ is not a contemporary substitution, it's a historical borrowing. It's like saying "English substitutes french /s/ with /ʃ/" on the basis of words like "fashion". Yeah, at one point, French had an /s/ sound that sounds like English /ʃ/, but the pronunciations of both has changed and that doesn't happen any more.

The replacement of /ðˤ/ with /l/ in e.g. lohor is likewise a borrowing - but it seems to be ancient. ض is reconstructed as a velarised voiced lateral fricative in Wikipedia. And that borrowing is widespread; Indian Muslims going full Indian on me are surprised that I recognise "Lohor" from Indonesian. For my part, I pronounce it as thoohoo (book), but most native Australian English speaking Muslims seem to use /s z z/ for Arabic /θ ð ðˤ/ - they learnt the Arabic words from their Pakistani/Indian parents - and therefore say "zohaw" (hot). Even in recitation - Arabs seem to ask them to stop leading salah~sholat, but that hasn't happened to me.

Also, it's not actually /dʒ/ but more of a palatal stop. My wife - and even I - can certainly hear my accent in Indonesian. I also can't hear the difference between c and j unless I already recognise the word.

> Be careful to distinguish borrowings and substitutions. They are not the same.

They are the same. You're comparing substitutions that happened hundreds of years ago to substitutions that happen today. They follow different rules for obvious reasons, but they're not different things.

I thought B and P were differentiated by the aspiration

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.

At least for me, P has an extra pop of air so sounds slightly different

I’m inclined to change the vowel sound in sba compared to spa, but I’m pretty sure the consonant sound is the same.

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>.

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].)