FTR, I was being sarcastic. But my true feelings are that I don’t give a whit what sounds Shrub’s mouth does or doesn’t like to place in sequence. To me, orthography is important, and so is diction.
As far as your remonstrance to ubermensch above, I believe he stated quite clearly why he was placing Shrub’s title in quotes. It appears that he’s okay with Shrub supporters thinking he looks like an ass.
What I’m seeing is that there’s really no “i” there, Ace. Tricky language, ain’t it?! The ‘ng’ is the syllable former. Sonorant consonats, in addition to vowels, can form syllables. BTW, the ‘ng’ is represented in the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) by one sybmol because it’s one sound.
A good example (classic, even) is the pronunciation of the word ‘bird’. The IPA (you can get that from http://www.sil.org) shows it as follows:
I’ll go ahead and write each segment’s description next to it and then write the next segment beneath that.
b voiced bilabial stop
upside down r with a small vertical line under it syllabic r, sometimes represented by the schwa with a little tick mark on the upper right side & in that case called a “r-colored schwa”
d voiced alveolar stop
There’s no ‘i’ in that word either.
So, getting back to larngks what we’re dealing with at the end is the velar nasal followed by the voiceless velar stop which is in turn followed by the voiceless alveolar fricative.
So is President Bush incapable of saying clear then? Does he instead say cular? If not, then I suggest that it has little to do with Bush’s dialect or an unfamiliarity with a “particular set of sounds” and more to do with upbringing and education.
I’d be interested to hear how he pronounces binocular.
Please see above, Skogcat, where I mentioned word-initial, word-medial, and word-final. Those are all different environments and some segments can appear in one of those environments but not the other, depending on the dialect/language concerned of course.
Bush has more education than I do, so I doubt very seriously it has to do with a lack thereof.
No, it does not. Look at it again. Tell me, please, where, in the pronunciation section (that’s the nifty bit between the parentheses), that there’s an i.
Upon close inspection–heck, even upon cursory inspection–one will notice that there’s no i in the pronunciation.
From the OED, larinks (the n has a funny little tail to it that I cannot do but it is not pertinent to the discussion).
This actually doesn’t contradict your larngks but what you are failing to see (or hear) is that the i sound, that is almost implied in some accents, falls between the r and the n. lar(i)ngks.
ngks equals nx ngks does not equal nix
(on preview)
Monty I don’t have much of an opinion over the two r sounds. It does amuse me that it sounds like tourism but I recognise it as lazy speach patterns. Nukular, on the other hand, gives the impression that he is an idiot (I do realise he is not an idiot and undoubtedly far better educated than I but that is still the impression he gives).
Between the r and the n there is an i with a ( rotated anticlockwise through 90 degrees, above it. This symbol is for the sound i as in Pit. That is where the i is, and it occurs in front of the ngks