This 58th 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 6

• A velar vowel would be followed by a velar consonant.

• There is a nasal airflow [+nasal] as in the Distinctive Features matrix for all the pronunciations in the word ten.

• The rule is /te_/ where the blank is the variable.

• [+stop +labial] are [+voice] in word-final position.

• All the words are NP, they derive to the NP by compounding. The word class to which lexical morphemes belong is important for their ordering within complex words.

• Word-endings are nasaled before consonants.

• Consonants ‘b’, ‘p’ with plosive and labial sounds usually follow ‘n’ which produces the ‘m’ sound.

• They are allophones of the same phoneme whereby the final position word plosives are pronouns via the place of articulation.

• All consonants after ‘ten’ will cause the ‘n’ to be voiced.

• The /m/ sound is used before [+sonorant] and the /n/ sound before [+voice].

• The final ‘n’ is not articulated fully, in anticipation of ‘c’. It is not pronounced as the letter ‘n’ itself.

• All five pronunciations are nasal sounds. They all begin with vowels.

• The data shows that articulators are used.

• The vowel is short before nasal consonants, with short utterances. The vowel ‘e’ is long before voiceless consonants.

• Plosives and (bi)labial are used for the consonant b. Nasal are used for the consonant m, n, ŋ.

• The last phonetic symbol of the different transcriptions always belongs under the same articulation position of the first phonetic symbol of the following word. E.g. the phonetic symbol [n] is an alveolar articulator, likened to that of [d].

• The word-initial is voiced and the word-final utterance has a nasal sound.

More to come...

	Top Tips For Linguists—Part I—The SpecGram Editorial Board
	Barnyard Linguistics—Carle Day-Tepharmer
	SpecGram Vol CLXXIV, No 3 Contents