I also read Hop on Pop to my kids many times, and had to force myself to say “thing” instead of “thang.” I don’t know how I got in the habit of saying “thang”; AFAIK thing is the only ing word I pronounce that way. (Once or twice, many decades ago, someone said our family had an “Okie” accent.)
BTW, there is a continuous space in which vowels reside and classification thresholds vary. For example, although Thai has dozens of distinct vowels, “Gems” and “James” are homonyms and transliterated identically.
As another example, I knew a Missourian named “Len” who called himself “Lin.” But when I started to call him “Lin” it infuriated him: “My name’s not Lin, it’s Lin!”
Actually, what I most wonder about is why don’t more people record their own voice samples in threads like these.
We have threads going on for pages, and people are trying to communicate using IPA or with rhymes. The problem with IPA is that a lot of people don’t know how to read it, and the problem with rhymes (i.e. “I say sing like I say ping and king”) is that the words that you are comparing the word under discussion with, themselves don’t have a universally agreed-upon pronunciations.
A two-second recording of how you say something clarifies a lot.
Do you think people’s reluctance to record their own voice in these discussions is due to (a) thinking that text alone is sufficient to describe the sounds (b) they don’t like to record their voice for privacy reasons (c) they don’t have a microphone (d) they don’t know where to put the sound to be able to share it (e) other?
The vowel in ‘thing’ and ‘sing’ would normally be represented as /i:/ phonetically and considered to rhyme with ‘seen’ and ‘green’. However, in ‘thing’ you start to pronounce that vowel with the tongue slightly lower, as a result of the fact articulating the /th/ requires the tongue to be down far enough to touch the bottom of your front teeth. This can give the vowel sound a slightly more open quality, like a close /e/. A close /e/ is like the vowel in the German word streben, and we’re really not supposed to have it in Standard English. But the pronunciation of vowels is influenced by adjacent consonants.
A similar example is how some young children (just in North America, I think) pronounce ‘both’ like ‘bolth’. As the tongue moves to pronounce the final /th/, it may touch the kid’s palate in passing so as to articulate the dark /l/ sound.
Central Ohio here. Get and wet don’t rhyme to me (get and fit have identical or nearly identical vowels when I say them), but thing and sing do. (A lot of the divisions in vowel sounds come right through this area, though, so I’m sure there will be posts from this same area saying something else.)
If I say “theen” it sounds nothing at all like it rhymes with “seen.” Nor does it sound like “thing.”
And what’s “Standard English”? Wikipedia seems to think it’s what they speak in Iowa, but man, I’ve been to Iowa and those folks have a comically obvious accent, to me anyway.
To me ‘theen’ does sound closer to ‘seen’, and I suspect that’s because of the final consonant being the same. Whenever you pronounce a vowel, your tongue and mouth are getting ready to pronounce the next sound, and that affects the articulation of the vowel.
I meant English as it would normally be taught to nonspeakers, whether it’s BrE or AmE. IIRC where they list the vowels in the introductory lessons, you would never find the closed e (/e/) as one of the sounds to be learned. My phonology is quite rusty, but I do think it would be correct to say that the closed /e/ does exist in English as an allophone–i.e. a variant pronunciation of a phoneme determined by context and not conveying a different meaning.
But after people did vocal samples for me for taught/tot and caught/cot, I can understand where people who don’t think they’re really pronounced differently (spontaneously) are coming from, because their renditions of the aught words sound like someone jokingly exaggerating for effect rather than a real effort to say the words.
I mistyped that, sorry. Theen and seen do sound similar - but, then, “theen” is not a real word, it’s just “seen” with a “th” at the start, so I wouldn’t pronounce it otherwise. Theen and “thing” of course do not have the same vowel sound. I’m still struggling to understand who would say “thing” with a long e sound who doesn’t have a Mexican accent. I’ve been all over the States and never heard that outside the Southwest, among Hispanics.
If I leave off the final consonant “thing” and “seen” still don’t rhyme. They aren’t the same vowel.
