Cross-language.... something

[afuna]

Trying to find an English word which sounds out like "ng+g" (not necessarily spelled that way), to prove (or maybe disprove) a point in a conversation.

I thought "finger" was close, but it turns out it's pronounced "fin+ger", rather than "fing+ger", huh.

Comments

[pne]

Do you also have "ng" at the beginning of a word? That's something that doesn't occur in English.

(And then there's the funny "ng", which is pronounced "nang", as far as I know....)

[afuna]

Nope, only at the middle or end ("ng" excepted).

OH oh, do you know about "nang", too? It's different from "ng" which is pronounced "nang" except that the word "nang" has a longer more open a, and the word "ng" has a less... full a.

(I wish I knew the words to describe it to you *rueful*)

[pne]

OH oh, do you know about "nang", too? It's different from "ng" which is pronounced "nang" except that the word "nang" has a longer more open a, and the word "ng" has a less... full a.

Oh! No, never heard of it. Interesting, though; thanks!

What do the two words mean? IIRC, "ng" is some kind of article or preposition or something? Something along the lines of "of the" or "in the"?

And alphabets which don't have enough vowel letters for the language in question are annoying :( Similar thing with Italian, where "venti" can be either "twenty" or "winds" depending on which kind of "e" sound the word has; they're spelled identically. Or "Polish" and "polish" in English. And so on ...

[afuna]

Oooh I just thought of a way to differentiate the pronunciation:

nang : hang :: ng :: hung

"ng" is pretty close to "of"; not exactly equivalent, but anywhere you can use "of", you can use "ng". It's just that there's a few more uses for it.

"Nang" is hmm it's a part of speech I usually see with adverbs, where it's actually "na" + a connective "ng" which is used when a word ending in a vowel comes before a word beginning with a consonant (this is unrelated to the ng-which-means-of, because the connecting "ng" is just sound, not additional meaning).

Example:
Tumawa nang malakas = laughed loud
laugh (nang) loud

Kumain ng karne = ate meat (here "ng" doesn't map to "of", I don't think *g*
ate (ng) meat

[pauamma]

Coming in very late, but there are some words with initial ng. 2 common ones that come to mind are ngayon and ngunit. (And trying to pronounce them drives me nuts.)

[afuna]

Hmm, how are you trying to pronounce them? :-)

(I should probably not ask you to pronounce "nganga".

[pauamma]

Hmm, how are you trying to pronounce them? :-)

I think that I either insert a vowel before that isn't there, or change the ng to some kind of g-ish consonant. Neither of which feels right.

I should probably not ask you to pronounce "nganga".

Yeah, I would probably go gaga trying to. :-)

[afuna]

Hmm. It's definitely more ng than g. Remind me to pronounce it for you some tiem :)