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It seems to me that a phonetic rule for one word is not particularly helpful. /n/ is the pronunciation in all the other words I can think of with /f/ following a post-vocalic /n/.
I wrote those words in another thread in response to one of lauralie2’s posts:
Allophones are predictable: they occur in obvious phonetic environments. For example, Banff (place in Canada) has two pronunciations, Ba[n]ff and Ba[m]ff. If you were a linguist hearing this language for the first time, how would you write down the word, with an <n> or an <m>? That is, which phoneme would you choose, /n/ or /m/? The answer is in the phonetic environment, predictability: both [m] and [f] are pronounced with the lips. The two sounds [m] and [f] share articulatory features. That's the 'obvious phonetic environment' I mentioned above. The word is Banff, with an /n/. The phonetic rule: /n/ is pronounced as [m] before /f/ in the word <Banff>.
Since then, I have looked up Banff in John Wells’s Longman Pronunciation Dictionary (3rd edition, 2008). He gives the pronunciation for both BrE and AmE as /n/ (with a superscript /t/, with /m/ (with a superscript /p/) as a variant. He uses a symbol to denote that the variant is ‘derived by rule’.
I still don’t think that a phonetic rule for one word is helpful. Can anybody come up with any other inf words in which the /n/ is pronounced /m/? Or is there something else that I am missing?
I wrote those words in another thread in response to one of lauralie2’s posts:
Allophones are predictable: they occur in obvious phonetic environments. For example, Banff (place in Canada) has two pronunciations, Ba[n]ff and Ba[m]ff. If you were a linguist hearing this language for the first time, how would you write down the word, with an <n> or an <m>? That is, which phoneme would you choose, /n/ or /m/? The answer is in the phonetic environment, predictability: both [m] and [f] are pronounced with the lips. The two sounds [m] and [f] share articulatory features. That's the 'obvious phonetic environment' I mentioned above. The word is Banff, with an /n/. The phonetic rule: /n/ is pronounced as [m] before /f/ in the word <Banff>.
Since then, I have looked up Banff in John Wells’s Longman Pronunciation Dictionary (3rd edition, 2008). He gives the pronunciation for both BrE and AmE as /n/ (with a superscript /t/, with /m/ (with a superscript /p/) as a variant. He uses a symbol to denote that the variant is ‘derived by rule’.
I still don’t think that a phonetic rule for one word is helpful. Can anybody come up with any other inf words in which the /n/ is pronounced /m/? Or is there something else that I am missing?
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