ŋ

Random phonetic musing.

Among Euro languages, only the Germanic group treats ŋ as a phoneme. In every language ŋ is a natural allophone of n before k or g within one word. It’s unavoidable.

English has three ways of pronouncing the written arrangement of n and g.
(The previous sentence includes all three.)

Examples after several different vowels:

anger flanger banger
finger hinges ringer
hunger lunges lungs

Comparing situations when ŋ is an allophone vs situations when ŋ is a phoneme helps to clarify the hidden role of word boundaries. We always know where one word ends and the next one starts, no matter how they’re written and no matter how fast or carelessly we speak.

When n is followed by k inside one word, n becomes ŋ.

When n at the end of one word is followed by k at the start of the next, there’s no coarticulation at all, and n is just n.

Some of these are contrived, but all are at least possible combinations:

sink amps vs sin camps vs sing camps
bank apps vs ban caps vs bang caps
think of her vs thin cover vs thing cover
rank Orson vs ran courses vs rang courses

It doesn’t matter if the two words are written together as a compound. We still know the boundary is there and we still separate rather than coarticulate. Some of the above examples could be compounds. BankApps, BanCaps, BangCaps are possible compounds, and the merged written form doesn’t affect our knowledge of boundaries. Words must be an intrinsic hardwired element of language.

= = = = =

As compensation, most Latin and Slavic languages have a distinct phoneme with a distinct symbol for palatalized L (lh, gl, ll, љ) and palatalized n (nh, gn, ñ, њ). The Germanic group skips these phonemes.