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]

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