# Dialect poll: How do you pronounce the simple past tense of "ring", as a bell? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [July 20, 2012, 5:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dialect-poll-how-do-you-pronounce-the-simple-past-tense-of-ring-as-a-bell/628819 "2012-07-20T05:30:17Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![Inner\_Stickler](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/inner_stickler/32/318_2.png) [@Inner\_Stickler](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Inner_Stickler)\ **Post date:** [July 24, 2012, 5:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dialect-poll-how-do-you-pronounce-the-simple-past-tense-of-ring-as-a-bell/628819/61 "2012-07-24T05:45:13Z")
> [@DrDeth](#): > > One reason why the IP system is bullshit. > > [http://oald8.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/dictionary/ring\_3](http://oald8.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/dictionary/ring_3) > rang > ræŋ ræŋ > > Note that those two are written exactly the same, but when you clik on the sounds, they sound different. Well, they sound different due to one being a British accent and the other is North American but as far as I can tell, the vowel sound in each is the same. The British woman has a lower voice with a more muted tone, but I’m pretty sure it’s the same vowel sound. ---
**Author:** ![Ximenean](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/x/aca169/32.png) [@Ximenean](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ximenean)\ **Post date:** [July 24, 2012, 9:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dialect-poll-how-do-you-pronounce-the-simple-past-tense-of-ring-as-a-bell/628819/62 "2012-07-24T09:57:28Z")
> [@AHunter3](#): > > The answers I’m getting so far are feeding my suspicions. > > I am now thinking that some people HEAR (or THINK OF) rang as having the same vowel as the a in ran and other people HEAR (or THINK OF) it as having the same vowel as the a in Maine or fate. But it is probably best understood as being neither of those things precisely; we know the ŋ sound that follows it colors the vowel by making it nasalized. So I think what’s happening is that we’re being somewhat evenly split into those to whom that sound seems closer to the “a” in ran and those to hom that sound seems closer to the “a” in fate. _Note that in both cases, people can’t think of a single example of the other configuration_ and in many cases can’t even conjure up what such a sound would sound like. I may be missing the point but, as a British English speaker, I am able imagine a pronunciation that I would describe as “raing”, different from how I hear “rang”. I’m saying it right now - raing, raing - and it doesn’t sound like how I say “rang”. ---
**Author:** ![Ximenean](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/x/aca169/32.png) [@Ximenean](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ximenean)\ **Post date:** [July 24, 2012, 10:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dialect-poll-how-do-you-pronounce-the-simple-past-tense-of-ring-as-a-bell/628819/63 "2012-07-24T10:11:49Z")
Oh wait, so what you and \*\*Johanna \*\*are saying is that there are three sounds - the one in “ran”, the one in “rain” and the one in “rang” - and for some speakers the one in “rang” and the one in “rain” are allophones of the same phoneme? While for other speakers, the two sounds in “rang” and “ran” are considered to be the same phoneme. (Simplifying a bit here because I guess there are more sound variations involved among different speakers, but that’s the gist, right?) ---
**Author:** ![Colophon](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/f05b48/32.png) [@Colophon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Colophon)\ **Post date:** [July 24, 2012, 10:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dialect-poll-how-do-you-pronounce-the-simple-past-tense-of-ring-as-a-bell/628819/64 "2012-07-24T10:50:33Z")
> [@kirk1168](#): > > Same here in Pittsburgh, PA. I associate the “rayng” pronunciation with the southern US. > [@Ximenean](#): > > I may be missing the point but, as a British English speaker, I am able imagine a pronunciation that I would describe as “raing”, different from how I hear “rang”. I’m saying it right now - raing, raing - and it doesn’t sound like how I say “rang”. Yes, if I try and say it as “rayng” it puts me in mind of Penelope Pitstop yelling “hayulp, hayulp!” ---
**Author:** ![Doug\_K](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b5ac83/32.png) [@Doug\_K](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Doug_K)\ **Post date:** [July 24, 2012, 12:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dialect-poll-how-do-you-pronounce-the-simple-past-tense-of-ring-as-a-bell/628819/65 "2012-07-24T12:34:47Z")
> [@Colophon](#): > > Yes, if I try and say it as “rayng” it puts me in mind of Penelope Pitstop yelling “hayulp, hayulp!” It makes me think of Ado Annie. “Ah’m jist a gurl who raing the bell” ---
**Author:** ![hogarth](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hogarth/32/1773_2.png) [@hogarth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/hogarth)\ **Post date:** [July 24, 2012, 1:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dialect-poll-how-do-you-pronounce-the-simple-past-tense-of-ring-as-a-bell/628819/66 "2012-07-24T13:42:47Z")
> [@Doug\_K](#): > > It makes me think of Ado Annie. “Ah’m jist a gurl who raing the bell” It makes me think of Lina Lamont in “The Singing Cavalier”. “I caiiiin’t stand 'im.” ---
**Author:** ![Eyebrows\_0f\_Doom](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/eyebrows_0f_doom/32/3119_2.png) [@Eyebrows\_0f\_Doom](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Eyebrows_0f_Doom)\ **Post date:** [July 24, 2012, 3:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dialect-poll-how-do-you-pronounce-the-simple-past-tense-of-ring-as-a-bell/628819/67 "2012-07-24T15:17:49Z")
“Raing” for “rang” is not a Southern pronunciation, the Northeast says it too. ---
**Author:** ![Johanna](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johanna/32/8318_2.png) [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)\ **Post date:** [July 24, 2012, 3:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dialect-poll-how-do-you-pronounce-the-simple-past-tense-of-ring-as-a-bell/628819/68 "2012-07-24T15:27:40Z")
> [@DrDeth](#): > > One reason why the IP system is bullshit. If you would learn the difference between “close transcription” and “broad transcription,” you’d find that the IPA is a finely tuned instrument that doesn’t always have to work on the finest tuned settings. It has various settings appropriate for different uses by linguistic professionals. It is also useful for the general public when applied to lexicography and language instruction. Back in 9th grade my French language curriculum used IPA to teach the sounds of French, and at the time it seemed to me perfectly appropriate and very helpful. Regular English dictionaries in the UK use IPA; only Americans seem completely ignorant of it. This is a consequence of the historically poor level of language learning in America compared to most other countries in the world. I was watching _Angel_ the other night, and was surprised and gratified to see that clue to demonic activities was a glyph unintelligible to the Americans: **ʔ** When I saw it, I said: “That’s the IPA symbol for the glottal stop.” Then Wesley said, “It’s the International Phonetic Alphabet symbol for the glottal stop.” How rare is it to see such learning on a TV show?! (And I’m not someone who uses the interrobang lightly.) It did my geekgirl heart a world of good. 😃 > [@](#): > > Note that those two are written exactly the same, but when you clik on the sounds, they sound different. Once again—This is the well-studied phenomenon called _ **allophony** _. However different the sounds produced in different dialects, they all share the same phonemic identity. A phoneme is like a specific job in an organization. Various different individuals can fill that position, but the position itself has a fixed identity in the organization. Now imagine it’s like fraternal twins, triplets, or even quadruplets are hired for the same position. Their family resemblance to each other is obvious, but if you look closely you can spot the differences. Any given one of them can occupy that cubicle in the office at a given time, and still fulfill all the functions of that position. The cubicle is the phoneme, and the fraternal sibling personnel sharing it are the allophones. > [@Ximenean](#): > > Oh wait, so what you and \*\*Johanna \*\*are saying is that there are three sounds - the one in “ran”, the one in “rain” and the one in “rang” - and for some speakers the one in “rang” and the one in “rain” are allophones of the same phoneme? While for other speakers, the two sounds in “rang” and “ran” are considered to be the same phoneme. > > (Simplifying a bit here because I guess there are more sound variations involved among different speakers, but that’s the gist, right?) Yep, you got it. 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![Johanna](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johanna/32/8318_2.png) [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)\ **Post date:** [July 24, 2012, 4:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dialect-poll-how-do-you-pronounce-the-simple-past-tense-of-ring-as-a-bell/628819/69 "2012-07-24T16:04:03Z")
To extend the allegory: To look at the phonemes is like being a businessperson or technician when you deal impersonally with that organization: you’re concerned with the functions fulfilled by the various roles within the organization. For phoneme-level studies, a broad transcription is appropriate. To look at the allophones is like being a social worker who is concerned with the individual persons who work there and dealing with them as individual people, each with her or his own snowflakey uniqueness. For allophone-level phonetics and phonology studies, a close transcription is appropriate. One that would focus in on the differences, however minute, between similar sounds in different dialects. For phonemes, you zoom the focus out. For fun, you can look up the concepts of “emic” and “etic” in the social sciences, and find out why they cribbed off the linguistic terms phonemic and phonetic. ---
**Author:** ![Crotalus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/crotalus/32/41_2.png) [@Crotalus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Crotalus)\ **Post date:** [July 24, 2012, 4:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dialect-poll-how-do-you-pronounce-the-simple-past-tense-of-ring-as-a-bell/628819/70 "2012-07-24T16:06:05Z")
> [@Northern\_Piper](#): > > Your wife must love that! This was a one-time, solitary activity purely for scientific purposes. 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![pulykamell](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pulykamell/32/3166_2.png) [@pulykamell](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pulykamell)\ **Post date:** [July 24, 2012, 5:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dialect-poll-how-do-you-pronounce-the-simple-past-tense-of-ring-as-a-bell/628819/71 "2012-07-24T17:24:36Z")
> [@DrDeth](#): > > Oddly, both of those two drop the “G” sound mostly, which is a way I never hear it. I sometimes pronounce the “g” as well, when I’m speaking carefully, but when a similar topic came up a couple months ago and I made a vocal sample of “thang/theng/thing/theeng,” it was remarked upon that it was unusual to actually enunciate the “g” at the end of a nasal like that. [Read posts 146-148 here.](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=641931&page=3) ---
**Author:** ![Johanna](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johanna/32/8318_2.png) [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)\ **Post date:** [July 24, 2012, 8:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dialect-poll-how-do-you-pronounce-the-simple-past-tense-of-ring-as-a-bell/628819/72 "2012-07-24T20:50:39Z")
Huh? There is no /g/ sound in final “-ng” in English. ---
**Author:** ![Inner\_Stickler](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/inner_stickler/32/318_2.png) [@Inner\_Stickler](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Inner_Stickler)\ **Post date:** [July 24, 2012, 8:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dialect-poll-how-do-you-pronounce-the-simple-past-tense-of-ring-as-a-bell/628819/73 "2012-07-24T20:57:49Z")
There is in his pronunciation of the words in the [audio file!](http://www.pawinskiphotography.com/public/thang.mp3) ---
**Author:** ![Skammer](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/skammer/32/143_2.png) [@Skammer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Skammer)\ **Post date:** [July 24, 2012, 9:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dialect-poll-how-do-you-pronounce-the-simple-past-tense-of-ring-as-a-bell/628819/74 "2012-07-24T21:14:43Z")
> [@DrDeth](#): > > Rang rimes with wang, bang, gang, fang, etc. Never with ran, fan, ban, Dan. > > Oddly, both of those two drop the “G” sound mostly, which is a way I never hear it. > > But of the two the NAmE pronunciation is closest. So yeah, if you say “rain” but take away the N but add a G, that’s the way we say it around here. Nobody is claiming that rang doesn’t rhyme with wang, bang, gang, etc. We pronounce all of them with the short-a sound like in ran, fan, ban. Of course they don’t rhyme anymore than “bin” rhymes with “sing”. But if I say “rang” without the “ng” and “ran” without the “n”, they are the same sound. I _can_ say “raing” but it sounds horribly incorrect to me, like saying “cain’t” instead of “can’t.” ---
**Author:** ![Ximenean](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/x/aca169/32.png) [@Ximenean](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ximenean)\ **Post date:** [July 24, 2012, 9:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dialect-poll-how-do-you-pronounce-the-simple-past-tense-of-ring-as-a-bell/628819/75 "2012-07-24T21:16:22Z")
> [@Johanna](#): > > Huh? There is no /g/ sound in final “-ng” in English. There is if you come from Birmingham, England, or thereabouts! It’s one of the hallmarks of that accent, the /ŋɡ/ sound where other English speakers would use just /ŋ/. ---
**Author:** ![Johanna](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johanna/32/8318_2.png) [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)\ **Post date:** [July 24, 2012, 9:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dialect-poll-how-do-you-pronounce-the-simple-past-tense-of-ring-as-a-bell/628819/76 "2012-07-24T21:16:40Z")
So he did, but his addition of velar stop [g] at the ends of the words is not standard English pronunciation. It is a feature of Indian English basilect, though; most Indian languages never have -[ŋ] in final position. To recap: What we spell as “ng” can have two different pronunciations: [ŋ] as in singer; or [ŋg] as in finger. In English orthography, a learner can’t know offhand which pronunciation “ng” has in the middle of a word. But in English, at the end of a word, -“ng” is always pronounced with final -/ŋ/. In Malay, to clear up this ambiguity, whenever they write just “ng” they mean [ŋ], and to show the pronunciation [ŋg], they write an extra g, as in _ringgit_. > [@Ximenean](#): > > There is if you come from Birmingham, England, or thereabouts! It’s one of the hallmarks of that accent, the /ŋɡ/ sound where other English speakers would use just /ŋ/. Thanks. I didn’t know about that. It sounds weird to my ears. ---
**Author:** ![pulykamell](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pulykamell/32/3166_2.png) [@pulykamell](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pulykamell)\ **Post date:** [July 24, 2012, 10:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dialect-poll-how-do-you-pronounce-the-simple-past-tense-of-ring-as-a-bell/628819/77 "2012-07-24T22:17:32Z")
> [@Johanna](#): > > So he did, but his addition of velar stop [g] at the ends of the words is not standard English pronunciation. I agree. As I mentioned in this post and the post in the last thread, it was a matter of me over-enunciating for that audio file. My response to **DrDeth** was meant to counter his assertion that the “g” sound at the end of “ng” combinations was usual English as, as this thread and the previous one illustrates, it stuck out to several native speakers of English as being unusual. ETA: Actually, I’m wondering if it is a quirk of my accent. To me, “finger” and “singer” have the same pronunciation for the “ng” in the middle of it. So perhaps I have a quirk where I do pronounce the “g” in “ng” combinations. ---
**Author:** ![pulykamell](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pulykamell/32/3166_2.png) [@pulykamell](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pulykamell)\ **Post date:** [June 26, 2014, 5:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dialect-poll-how-do-you-pronounce-the-simple-past-tense-of-ring-as-a-bell/628819/78 "2014-06-26T17:35:37Z")
Whoops. Wrong thread. Too many tabs open. ---
**Author:** ![Hari\_Seldon](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hari_seldon/32/5173_2.png) [@Hari\_Seldon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hari_Seldon)\ **Post date:** [June 26, 2014, 10:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dialect-poll-how-do-you-pronounce-the-simple-past-tense-of-ring-as-a-bell/628819/79 "2014-06-26T22:33:33Z")
FWIW (not much) I say rain and rang very differently. Just for the record, it is closest to the vowel in the modal can, except the n is nasalized. The vowel in the noun and ordinary verb can is different, more like the vowel in fairy. And the vowel in rain is yet another variation. I would say that had a y in it. Born and raised in Philadelphia. ---
**Author:** ![stui\_magpie](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/stui_magpie/32/11010_2.png) [@stui\_magpie](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/stui_magpie)\ **Post date:** [June 26, 2014, 11:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dialect-poll-how-do-you-pronounce-the-simple-past-tense-of-ring-as-a-bell/628819/80 "2014-06-26T23:06:06Z")
Aussie. Rang like Bang, as in [Bang a Boomerang](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CsJCa2TlXU&list=RD_CsJCa2TlXU). Bugger trying to explain how it’s pronounced, listen for yourself. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dialect-poll-how-do-you-pronounce-the-simple-past-tense-of-ring-as-a-bell/628819.md?page=3) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dialect-poll-how-do-you-pronounce-the-simple-past-tense-of-ring-as-a-bell/628819.md?page=5)