Talk:Voiced dental, alveolar and postalveolar nasals
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I'm not completely certain about ŋ being an allophone of /n/ in words like stink, but it would seem to be the case given that I've heard people pronounce words like the name Hancock with either sound without noticing the difference. Is this a good test for whether sounds are allophones? CyborgTosser (Only half the battle) 09:55, 24 Jan 2005 (UTC)
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Not so much an allophone (as the velar nasal is clearly a phoneme in English) but a neutralization of the distinction between the two in that environment. Nasals have a tendency to assimilate to stops, it's a common feature cross-linguistically.24.235.159.34 04:42, 1 September 2007 (UTC)
- Not noticing the difference may also be a sign of free variation. I've noticed that people don't notice the difference between [ŋg] and [ŋ]. We have some "near-rhyme" contrasts (such as singer and finger) but we also have words in free variation (such as hanger) where people use either. I've noticed that most people either don't notice the difference unless it's pointed out to them or who can't tell the difference even when it is. I would even argue that not noticing the difference might be a sign that sounds are not allophones; we would certainly notice if people aspirated the p in spat or didn't turn the 't' in writer to a flap. Ƶ§œš¹ [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi] 05:38, 1 September 2007 (UTC)