We've been watching entirely too much TV lately, with everybody being sick and all

[conuly]

Which is how we discovered Superwhy.

This show is seriously cute. SERIOUSLY.

So I visited their website. And if you click around a bit, you discover the part where the various characters have their own little videos. Princess Presto has "I love to spell". Great, great. She carefully sounds out the words, then spells them with her wand. Love it.

Except... she sounds out "Sing" by asking what letters make the N and G sounds.

Don't see the problem? Say the word a couple of times. A couple more. Slowly. Yeah. There's neither an N nor a G sound in it! Instead, there is a single ng sound - and that's the difference between sing and sin, so it's an important one! One would not spell out "Shin" as the S and H sounds, instead one would say that the sh sound is made from two letters, and that's the same principle here. BAD VIDEO. BAD.

(Meanwhile, Angelique is much more concerned about the fact that they don't say please to their supercomputer, and compelled me to type them a sternly worded email about it. We all have our priorities.)

Comments

[appadil.livejournal.com]

For me, my tongue hits the same spot for the "n" in "ng" as it does for any other "n" sound and starts sliding towards the spot it would normally go for "g", but never quite gets all the way there. It doesn't make a stop at any point, but neither does "nd"- it and "nd" are less distinct than consonant combinations like "ts" which have a clear phoneme separation, but it's vastly more distinct than "sh" or "th". It's sort of roughly on the same level as "pl"..

...Possibly related tangent, my sister pronounces terminal "ng"s oddly- to my family and I, she seems to be dropping the "g", but it's still possible to tell the difference between her "sin" and "sin(g)" even though I'd write it without the g if I were trying to transcribe her speech phonetically.
I'm wondering now if your "ŋ" might be the same as her "n(g)" which is virtually allophonic with "n" to me.

[conuly]

Well, now we've both learned something new, haven't we?

I'm never sure which smiley to insert to sound happy without any rudeness, so just pick your favorite and stick it in there.

[appadil.livejournal.com]

Heh. =^_^=