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

A Sample of Self-Definers—Historical Linguistics, Etymology, and Sound Changes: Part II—The SpecGram Book Elves™

Dubitable 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 64th 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 8

The coda of ten should be a nasal sound.
When single word-final consonants are voiced, nasal sounds are velar.
When the manner of articulation moves from nasal to fricative or plosive, the place of articulation stays constant. (from one phoneme to the next.)
The transcribed words are all [+voice].
In paired voice and voiceless sounds, the voiceless sound appears to the left of its voiced counterpart. There is a need to prepare for the next sound following one.
The words are plosives which are articulated through the nasal cavities. Ten can be pronounced using both lips [tem].
The sounds replace each other at the end of the word, in this case in the same context.
The pattern is: when the syllable begins with a single word-initial plosive, the third sound is a nasal sound.
Short vowel in /teŋ/ and long vowel in /tem/. The pronunciation is different.
If there is a labio-plosive, ten is [tem] not [ten] because [m] is made opening the nasals which will be pronounced in different way, moreover [m] represents one sound that can be easier to be recognised in the transcription.
Assimilation: would become more like other sounds.
Throughout my observations, the ten sounds [tem] because it follows plossive. /b/ is in plossive manner.
ten pronounces in different ways because of the phoneme. These different sounds contrast in the same context, meaning that “contrastive sounds” then produce different meaning. By the way, for ten dots /n/ stays the same because /d/ is closure and /s/ is voiceless. ‘n’ and ‘d’ place the same articulation.
It is [tem] not [ten] because [m] is nasal opening which cannot be pronounced at the same time—[n] is nasal opening and [b] is nasal closure. The same things are applied for [ŋ].
The nasals are [+son] with smooth airflow through the nose, especially when they are in a sequence with a [-son].
The pattern of all data is labial-unrounded, e.g. [e] and (-sonorant), plosive. The plosive shares the same sound as those words begin.
It becomes [tem] because there is a stress in b of the bins. In the word dots we have to prolong our voice, and in the word tens there is no word after it.

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.

	A Sample of Self-Definers—Historical Linguistics, Etymology, and Sound Changes: Part II—The SpecGram Book Elves™
	Bar None—Donald N.S. Unger
	SpecGram Vol CLXXVI, No 1 Contents

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