Do the /æ/ sound become an /e/ when said before a m/n/ng sound?

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ngabriel

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Hello.
I often hear the /æ/ sound as an ''proper /æ/'', like in the words bad or bat and pretty much every other word which doesn't have an m/n/ng sound after the /æ/. But when it comes to these consonant sounds, I get confused. I usually hear an /e/ sound before them.
Examples:
Than - Then
Thank you - Thenk you
Mango - Mengo

And if this is a feature of some accent, please let me know!

Thanks in advance!
 

dejavecue

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Hello ngabriel,

in RP, that is not the case - see bang, ham, man as examples /bæŋ/, /hæm/, /mæn/

But I would say there are dialects and accents that treat this the way you described. Something scottish maybe, but I cannot guarantee that so we may wait for another answer...
 

5jj

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In some varieties of English (such as the 'refined' English of fifty or more years ago)the pronunciation of /æ/ was close to that of /e/, but in all words. I don't know of a variety in which it is so pronounced just before a nasal.
 

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I don't know of any accent that pronounces the /æ/ the same in 'bat' and 'man'. I think IPA has it wrong.
 

5jj

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I don't know of any accent that pronounces the /æ/ the same in 'bat' and 'man'. I think IPA has it wrong.
/æ/ is a phonemic symbol, not a phonetic one. In most accents that I know they are pronounced the same phonologically. It's a different story if one starts on narrow phonetic transcription,
 

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:up: Precisely. I don't think many students of English appreciate (or care very much about) the distinction; (nor do some EFL teachers, come to that:))

b
 

ngabriel

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Let me give you an example with audio: Guthrie Govan - Singing Scales - Session 6 Licklibrary - YouTube


In this video, the first sentence he says is:


''I can't really offer any tips on that idea other -THAN- assuring you it's a healthy way to approach things''


The than in there is exactly like the word then to me.

For your native speakers ears is that an /æ/, an /e/ or another sound which doesn't have a IPA symbol?
 

5jj

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That's an unstressed 'than'. The vowel is /ə/. You can hear this vowel in unstressed 'an' and 'can', but you can also hear it in unstressed 'that'. The weakening of the vowel is nothing to do with the following consonant.

Guthrie's /ə/ was closer to /e/ than that of many speakers, but I am sure he would use the same vowel in 'that'.
 
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Raymott

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5jj

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We probably don't need an example, since no native speaker (yet) has denied your discovery - stressed 'that' and 'than' have different vowel sounds in almost all English accents (all that I know).
Well, I have certainly said that the vowels in /bæk/ and /mæn/ are not different phonemes; I would say the same of 'that' and 'than'. To a degree, any individual phoneme is affected by the onset of the consonant following it and, to a lesser extent, by the consonant preceding it. The length of the phoneme is affected by whether the following consonant is voiced or voiceless.

However, most native speakers and learners are completely unaware of this.

Sometimes allophonic differences that are not consciously recognised by native speakers need to be pointed out to some learners, or they will always sound 'foreign'. An example of this is the aspirated /p/ in 'pin', the unaspirated /p/ in 'spin' and the unexploded /p/ in 'snip'; ignorance of these different allophones can cause problems for speakers of some Slavonic languages. However, some of the allophonic variations of /æ/ within the speech of single native speaker are detectable only by a spectrogram.
 

5jj

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I don't know of any accent that pronounces the /æ/ the same in 'bat' and 'man'. I think IPA has it wrong.
I do not really know what you mean by that second sentence.

If by IPA you mean the International Phonetic association, that does not dictate how words should be transcribed. It created, and has several times updated a list of symbols representing all the known and most of the possible sounds in all human languages. [æ] (in square brackets) is one of these symbols, and any trained phonetician, whatever his or her nationality will be able to produce exactly the same sound when s/he reads that symbol. It is not, incidentally, the sound that many native speakers produce in 'bat or 'man'.

If by IPA you mean International Phonetic Alphabet, then most untrained people do not use it. What they use is a set of phonemic symbols borrowed from the IPA. For each sound, linguists within a country pick an IPA symbol, usually either one that is a letter that frequently represents that sound normal orthography as with the /e/ that most (not all) British course books and dictionaries use for the vowel sound in 'dress' and 'bed', or an IPA symbol that is very close to the native English sound, as with many of the consonants.
 

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Well, I have certainly said that the vowels in /bæk/ and /mæn/ are not different phonemes; I would say the same of 'that' and 'than'.
Yes, but you haven't stated, even yet, that the /æ/ phoneme is usually pronounced the same in 'back' and 'man', or 'that' and 'than'.
Since it is a phonemic symbol, it has allophonic variations and, as far as I know, there are no English accents that pronounce the 'ash' phoneme the same in 'bat' and 'man'; and no one has denied that. That's all I'm saying.
The OP was commenting on their different sounds, not the more complex concept of allophonic variation. I was explaining that what he heard was true. We do say them differently. Maybe I overreacted by blaming IPA for this.
 

5jj

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Yes, but you haven't stated, even yet, that the /æ/ phoneme is usually pronounced the same in 'back' and 'man', or 'that' and 'than'.
Since it is a phonemic symbol, it has allophonic variations and, as far as I know, there are no English accents that pronounce the 'ash' phoneme the same in 'bat' and 'man'; and no one has denied that. That's all I'm saying.
Some speakers may have a longer /æ/ in certain words (so there can be a difference) but most speakers have the same vowel quality. There is nothing like an /æ/ - /e/ difference in the vowels of 'back' and 'man' in any one speaker.

[h=2]Bad–lad split[/h] The bad–lad split is a phonemic split of the Early Modern English short vowel phoneme /æ/ into a short /æ/ and a long /æː/. This split is found in some varieties of English English and Australian English in which bad (with long [æː]) and lad (with short [æ]) do not rhyme. (Wells 1982: 288–89, 596; Horvath and Horvath 2001; Leitner 2004).
The phoneme /æ/ is usually lengthened to /æː/ when it comes before an /m/ or /n/, within the same syllable. It is furthermore lengthened in the adjectives bad, glad and mad; family also sometimes has a long vowel, regardless of whether it is pronounced as two or three syllables. Some speakers and regional varieties also use /æː/ before /ɡ/, /ŋ/, /l/ and/or /dʒ/; such lengthening may be more irregular than others. Lengthening is prohibited in the past tense of irregular verbs and function words and in modern contractions of polysyllabic words where the /æ/ was before a consonant followed by a vowel. Lengthening is not stopped by the addition of word-level suffixes.

Note that British dialects with the bad–lad split have instead broad /ɑː/ in some words where an /m/ or /n/ follows the vowel. In this circumstance, Australian speakers usually (but not universally) use /æː/, except in the words aunt, can't and shan't, which have broad /aː/.
Daniel Jones noted for RP that some speakers had a phonemic contrast between a long and a short /æ/ which he wrote as /æː/ and /æ/, respectively. Thus, in An outline of English phonetics (1962, ninth edition, Cambridge: W. Heffer & Sons) he noted that sad, bad generally had /æː/ but lad, pad had /æ/. In his pronouncing dictionary, he recorded several minimal pairs, for example bad /ˈbæːd/, bade /ˈbæd/ (also pronounced /ˈbeɪd/). He noted that for some speakers, jam actually represented two different pronunciations, one pronounced /ˈdʒæːm/ meaning 'fruit conserve', the other /ˈdʒæm/ meaning 'crush, wedging'. Later editions of this dictionary edited by Alfred C. Gimson, dropped this distinction.


Phonological history of English short A - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 

lsah3

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In some varieties of English (such as the 'refined' English of fifty or more years ago)the pronunciation of /æ/ was close to that of /e/, but in all words. I don't know of a variety in which it is so pronounced just before a nasal.
So you don't know American English :) Read about æ-tensing. It's present not only in US English, but also in Broad Australian English (check Wikipedia for sources) and some South African accents (check Ian Bekker - The vowels of South African English). It's probably less pronounced in Canadian English, but probably still present.
 

5jj

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So you don't know American English :)
Indeed I don't, and have never claimed to.
Read about æ-tensing. It's present not only in US English, but also in Broad Australian English (check Wikipedia for sources) and some South African accents (check Ian Bekker - The vowels of South African English). It's probably less pronounced in Canadian English, but probably still present.
Thank you for that. I was not aware of it. This does indeed confirm that in some Mid-Atlantic dialects of AmE, and Broad Australian, some South African and Canadian varieties there is a phonemic split.

Fortunately my blushes have been spared because I wrote, of the vowels in 'bat' and 'man', "In most accents that I know they are pronounced the same phonologically" (emphasis added).

I still maintain that in most dialects of BrE there is no phonemic split between the ash vowels of 'bat' and 'man'. From what I have read, there seems to be no phonemic split in most varieties of AmE.

ps. Welcome to the forum, Isah. :hi:
 
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lsah3

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Thank you for that. I was not aware of it. This does indeed confirm that in some Mid-Atlantic dialects of AmE, and Broad Australian, some South African and Canadian varieties there is a phonemic split.
Well, not quite. There's a phonemic split in few US accents (for example Philadelphia, New York), which means that /æ/ and /ẽə̯̃/ (I'm writing it with diacritics indicating nasalization, as /eə̯/ is a common transcription of the SQUARE vowel in RP) are distinct phonemes (like /ɪ/ in ship and /iː/ in sheep), but in most other accents that tense the /æ/, the higher and usually heavily nasalized vowel used before nasals is not a distinct phoneme, but an allophone of /æ/ - like /t/ in American English has at least 8 allophones - [tʰ t ɾ t̚ tˡ tⁿ ʔ t̪]. All of these are transcribed /t/, and only in narrow transcription are other features indicated.

I still maintain that in most dialects of BrE there is no phonemic split between the ash vowels of 'bat' and 'man'. From what I have read, there seems to be no phonemic split in most varieties of AmE.
That's true. As far as I know Bad-Lad split is only a southern English (but it's not so common there) and Australian thing.
ps. Welcome to the forum, Isah. :hi:
Thanks.

And to complicate things even further:

1. If you've ever heard the Upper Crust variety of RP, their /æ/ is often a pharyngealized centering diphthong [ɛə̯ˤ]. There's not much speakers of this variety though. Some other accents with an open-mid TRAP vowel (not a diphthong) are New Zealand English, many or most Asian accents, Cockney (not always), very few southern English accents, and broad varieties of South African and Australian English.

2. Speakers with a Northern Cities Vowel Shift pronounce /æ/ as a centering diphthong [ɛə̯~eə̯~ɪə̯] in all positions. It's still not a phonemic split, because there's nothing to split. It's just that there's no [æ] in their vowel inventory. And I'm well aware that there's 6 stages of NCVS - the thing is that this is the first, and therefore the most common one.
 
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