SpecGram—Abundant Things You Didn’t Know You Didn’t Know

From the Archives!—Jungftak Feathers—The SpecGram Archive Elves™

Thirteen Untranslatable Words—Michael Covarrubias

Abundant Things You Didn’t Know You Didn’t Know
(because they aren’t actually true)

gathered at great personal risk of
psycholinguistic harm from actual student papers

by Madalena Cruz-Ferreira

This 44th collection of students’ pearls of wisdom, laboriously digitised from hand-written papers, demonstrates once again how students new to the study of language speculate about grammar after having imperfectly absorbed what their teachers think they have taught them.

Test Question—Phonological Patterns

The word ten can be pronounced as transcribed^* below, in these utterances:

ten dots [ten]

ten bins [tem]

tens [ten]

ten cots [teŋ]

tenpins [tem]

Describe the pattern that you observe in the data.

Answers—Part 1

Nasal consonants occur immediately after the vowel [e].
The data shows that when the second syllable is a plosive, the coda of the first syllable changes.
For headed compounds, ‘n’ is pronounced as [-high] and [-back]. Non-headed compounds, ‘n’ is pronounced [+high] and [+back].
Should two consonantal sounds occur together, both must be either labial or non-labial.
The first word-middle consonant consisting of nasal and plosive sounds respectively are pronounced as nasal sounds.
[+stop +nasal] sounds are in word-final position if the sound following the word is plosive except for the /s/ which is fricative.
Single word-final consonants are nasal sounds.
In ten bins, the n can be assimilated by bins into [m]. This assimilation is retrospective in nature.
The sounds /m, n, ŋ/ are phonemes which can be identified in the data as they occur in contrastive distribution and are distinctive sounds. They are proceeded by /e/ as the syllable peak and followed by other phonemes.
The fricatives and plosives that occur immediately after the nasal sound /n/ in /ten/ is altered into a nasal, i.e., they are not pronounced.
The last consonant is +nasal +sonorant +stop -low -front -dental +voice.
The consonants in the word-final position of ‘ten’ are nasal sounds and the consonants of the word-initial position of any words following ‘ten’ have to be plosive sounds.
Nasal consonants are voiced in the word-final position and plosives and vowels are voiced in the word-initial position.
Ten is [teŋ] when after it is a plosives [c], and bilabial when coupled with bilabials [n] and [p] before it.
Nasal alveolars preceding a plosive sound, without a pause, becomes a labial or velar as the tongue blade is no longer involved.
The pattern shows minimal pair between ‘ten’ and ‘tem’, ‘tens’ and ‘ten dots’, ‘ten bins’ and ‘tenpins’, respectively.

More to come...

^* The interested and/or confused reader may note that, as becomes apparent through the various scholarly works published from time to time in an outfit attracting international attention such as ours, our linguistic brethren across the big pond are not only separated from us by a common language, but also by a common transcription system. Thus, caveat lector—transcription contents may unsettle during shipping overseas. —Eds.

	From the Archives!—Jungftak Feathers—The SpecGram Archive Elves™
	Thirteen Untranslatable Words—Michael Covarrubias
	SpecGram Vol CLXX, No 3 Contents

ten dots	[ten]
ten bins	[tem]
tens	[ten]
ten cots	[teŋ]
tenpins	[tem]