Are you sure? Because impatient and inpatient are different words. If you pronounce them the same, fine, but I wanted to make sure you didn’t accidentally not notice the difference.
Probably not inpatient/impatient so much. Come to think of it, I rarely use either of those words, even though I’m often frustrated that I work in a hospital. And I tend not to mispronounce the Inb words.
So I guess it’s just imput.
I saw your explanation, but it makes no sense to me. It’s like saying the word “nuclear” is difficult to pronounce, so I just say “nucular” instead.
And a lot of people do.
I actually get something like in mplace of.
All humans employ some kind of assimilation in their natural speech spoken at conversational speeds. If it’s not “imput” for you, there will be many examples that could be taken from recordings of your speech. Things like “Jeet jet?” for “Did you eat yet?” (not specifically THAT, necesarily … just common, everyday utterances that “collapse” in that way).
In relaxed, informal speech, I say “kive” for “can I have”.
Ditto.
Assimilation can also work perseveratively – “ind place of” can also occur if the articulators (i.e. parts of the mouth used in speech) “clip off” the nasal sound /n/, then fully close off the oral cavity for a split second before bringing the lips together to pronounce the upcoming /p/. The timing of these events is measured in milliseconds, and there is considerable variance between speakers.
Speech is a very complicated, and marvelous, dance.
You know, it just dawned on me that I probably should have made this a multiple choice poll and included another set of words. I may make another poll in a bit if it’s contentious, but just let me ask this:
Do you pronounce think as [thiŋk]? Specifically, do you pronounce it like thing with a k at the end, or thin with a k at the end? Or do you even hear a difference?
Very true.
Someone will disagree … but in fact, the pronunciation bolded above is as good as invariable among English speakers (providing for some variation in the vowel).
The soft palate has to lower and remain lowered throughout the pronunciation of the /n/. Meanwhile, the back of the tongue is already “reaching back” to position for the pronunciation of “k” … producing /ŋ/ in place of /n/.
Something similar happens in Japanese when “n” is followed by “p”. For example, they are written “kanpai” (cheers!) and “tenpura” (fried battered food), but they are pronounced “kampai” and “tempura”.
It should be noted that most “im-” words are etymologically the same as"in-" words. If I were to really break down the word “impossible”, I’d say that the root morphemes are /in-/ /possum/ and /ibilis/, despite the fact that it’s spelled with an M.
Indeed, pronouncing it as “nk” is a good sign of a non-native english speaker.
I pronounce it with an N. An M just seems bizarre.
Funny. I came up with this question while looking around Wikipedia, and I first saw it in Japanese before I looked up an English article on it.
Even funnier, the reason I was on Wikipedia in the first place was because I was looking up the proper pronunciation of the word under your name. I stumbled upon the Moraic nasal -n. One of the changes in pronunciation I knew it happened in the English word think (and similar).
So I look it up, and find that the nasal underspecifies not just before /k/ but also before /p/. Seeing as this contradicts my own pronunciation of input, I thought I’d make a poll.
Unfortunately, I now realize I missed an important part: the words “within the same morpheme.” Looking at the morpheme article, this seems to indicate that prefixes don’t count. I need a word that has an N before a P in something other than a prefix (or suffix, or between two parts of a compound word.)
My tongue goes to the ‘n’ position but due to the proximity of the p the resulting sound is somewhere inbetween m and n.