Pronunciation of ง when it is a final consonant

[Artful Dodger]

Does anyone else feel that ง is often pronounced more like -mg than -ng when it is in final position? I hear it that way when out and about and I have just been on thai-language.com where the clip of a native speaker saying  ถุง also sounds this way.

 

I also hear it pronounced -ng, for example in สิ่ง - maybe it depends on the vowel and/or the tone. If so, it would be good to work out which vowels / tones take the -mg sound and which take the -ng sound.

[Katia]

The question is... is this correct?  (Or is it just a fault in the pronunciation of some people?)  If not, what is the point of learning when to use it?

[Chou Anou]

I really don't see how it's possible for a human mouth to end a word with "mg"...? I mean, how would that even sound? I think it's pretty clear that the OP is mishearing things.

 

Maybe their first mistake is thinking of ง as "n + g" in the first place...it is not. It is "ng," a consonant sound that happens not to be represented with a single consonant in English, though it is in many other languages (including Thai). Really, it's one of the most simple and straightforward consonant sounds in Thai, especially in final position.

[HampiK]

It sounds as "ng" as in the English word sing.

 

About that this is very easy to speak… hmmmmm yes it is easy to speak but still many foreigner have a problem because it's not common for them especially in the beginning. like the word งู (ngu) which I hear many foreigner have big problems in speaking this word out.

[Briggsy]

@Artful Dodger

 

You appear to have created a distinction that I was unaware of, namely that ง at the end of a syllable has two distinct pronunciations.

 

Apart from the way you hear the words pronounced, are you aware of any linguistic material, such as a textbook, documenting this distinction. I am not.

 

Could it possibly be first language interference affecting the way you hear these sounds. May I ask what your first language is and if it is English, which regional variety you speak?

[Artful Dodger]

3 hours ago, Briggsy said:

@Artful Dodger

 

You appear to have created a distinction that I was unaware of, namely that ง at the end of a syllable has two distinct pronunciations.

 

Apart from the way you hear the words pronounced, are you aware of any linguistic material, such as a textbook, documenting this distinction. I am not.

No, I was hoping someone else might be. If you go to www.thai-language.com though, there are clips of native speakers saying various words and if you compare the two words I mentioned you may hear a difference. I have only heard the -mg version at the end of a syllable - when ง is in initial position it always sounds like ng- to me.

3 hours ago, Briggsy said:

 

Could it possibly be first language interference affecting the way you hear these sounds. May I ask what your first language is and if it is English, which regional variety you speak?

Yes, that's always a possibility to take into account - but I think it's rare for this to cause you to hear two sounds as different if they are the same. It does happen sometimes - for example Thais sometimes hear my English d sound as ด and sometimes as ต, but that's because it is between the two. I think your suggestion would be very plausible if English had both -mg and -ng, and ง was between the two, but that's not really the case. I can make the sound -mg without any difficulty, but it is hard to think of words that use it - it's not part of the basic inventory of English sounds. Mostly, I think interference works the other way around. For example, someone might be oblivious to the difference between พ and ป because both of them register as p. This stems from the fact that we register phonemes rather than sounds - the difference is quite well explained on Wikipedia:

 

A phoneme is a sound or a group of different sounds perceived to have the same function by speakers of the language or dialect in question. An example is the English phoneme /k/, which occurs in words such as cat, kit, scat, skit. Although most native speakers do not notice this, in most English dialects the "c/k" sounds in these words are not identical: in  kit (help·info) [kʰɪt] the sound is aspirated, while in  skill (help·info) [skɪl] it is unaspirated. The words therefore contain different speech sounds, or phones, transcribed [kʰ] for the aspirated form, [k] for the unaspirated one. These different sounds are nonetheless considered to belong to the same phoneme, because if a speaker used one instead of the other, the meaning of the word would not change: using the aspirated form [kʰ] in skill might sound odd, but the word would still be recognized.

 

In other words there's nothing unusual about a single phoneme mapping to more than one sound, but when it does, this does not mean you can use those sounds interchangeably. With this in mind it's quite possible that the phoneme ง does and is supposed to have different sounds in different words... but the fact that it is possible doesn't make it so, which is why I was wondering whether anyone else heard a difference.

 

For the record, my first language is English and I am originally from the Oxford area.

[Briggsy]

Okay, new tack. I am a long way from being convinced on this one.

Since :-

1. When words are pronounced in isolation, such as to provide an example for a non-native speaker, the sounds may be stressed or emphasised or lengthened to try and make them clearer.

2. Both /m/ and /ng/ are nasal consonants.

3. The way final /ng/ sounds are pronounced in British English differs significantly from the way final ง is pronounced in standard Thai.

4. There is no literature or commentary on this.

 

I am going to put it to you that this is just the way your ears and brain are processing the sound and there is no distinction.

 

However, perhaps you are right and there is a current evolution of the pronunciation of this sound in Thai.

 

/m/ requires the lips to be shut. /ng/ requires them to be open to prevent it sounding like /m/. Could this be the issue that the lips are opened slightly after the beginning of the pronunciation of the phoneme? And could this be related to the preceding vowel sound?

[Artful Dodger]

1 hour ago, Briggsy said:

/m/ requires the lips to be shut. /ng/ requires them to be open to prevent it sounding like /m/. Could this be the issue that the lips are opened slightly after the beginning of the pronunciation of the phoneme? And could this be related to the preceding vowel sound?

Yes, that sounds very plausible to me. It could just be that if the lips are shut when the person begins to pronounce what would otherwise be /ng/, it comes out /mg/ or even /mng/, and it would make perfect sense that that would depend on what had come immediately before.

 

I'm not sure we can say there is no literature or commentary - I have A Reference Grammar of Thai but that's about it. It isn't really a pronunciation manual, and anyway I can't say I have scoured it for info on this topic. In any case, this type of issue is often not documented, and it's very easy to overlook differences in sound when, as far as the listener is concerned, the sounds represent the same phoneme. I had a mate at uni who was from Bolton and he was totally oblivious to the difference in the vowels in look/luck, book/buck, took/tuck etc. because in his accent there was no difference. He would have been hearing them pronounced differently on the TV and whatever all his life, but hadn't noticed because we process everything according to the sound>phoneme mappings of our own dialect. Obviously, it's also easy to convince yourself there is a difference when there isn't, and I'm just as susceptible to that as anyone else...

[Katia]

Okay, let's put it this way, which is what I was getting at in my first post: regardless of whether people have lazy pronunciation, something about the way some people form the mouth makes it sound that way, or it's just in your hearing... as far as I know (I'm open to correction; I don't know much but the basics in this case), an ending sound of "mg" doesn't exist in Thai.  Therefore, know that it is *supposed* to be "ng" and speak that way (even if it turns out that even in your own pronunciation, it may even sound like "mg" to you or others).  The point I was getting at is, why even be concerned about learning to speak something that isn't correct?  You already know what it is supposed to be and can recognize it despite any mispronunciations/mishearing, so there's no need to learn it in order to understand others' speech.... so just don't learn it.

 

(I mean, in English some people pronounce "something" as "sumpin'" or "sut-um" or "somethin'" but that doesn't mean I'm going to aspire to speak that way.)

[Artful Dodger]

Sure, I understood the point you were making but I have an open mind on whether the sound does or does not exist in standard Thai - to me that's the next question to ask.

 

In your first post you also seemed to have an open mind - but you are now saying it is not correct, when as far as I can see nothing has changed.

 

In my own native language there are instances of lazy pronunciation that I would regard as incorrect (a cleaner we had at work would say 'bokkle' instead of 'bottle', for example) but there are also instances of correct pronunciation that is wrongly regarded as incorrect because of misconceptions about language, such as the belief that spelling determines pronunciation, or that a given phoneme must always be realised in the same way. Many children for example are trained to pronounce the word 'that' with the 'a' vowel in every case, when it should be a schwa if the word is unstressed. Whether the -mg realisation of ง belongs in the first of those categories or the second, I don't know, but I don't think the fact that learning resources describe it as -ng settles the question. For me, resources of that kind are only a starting point, and it is up to us to explore the details and thus come to understand the language. If there is some reason why it must always be -ng then I am all ears, but if this idea rests on the view that a given phoneme always corresponds to the same sound, I have to say I don't share that view.

[digbeth]

Where in Thailand did you notice this? maybe down south from Chumporn down they have accents and ways of pronouncing things like a lisp that could make you heard it like that?

[tgeezer]

I think it worth mentioning that native speakers have never seen Mae gong only แม่กง . Pig > ping > pimng , pimng would have to be written พิมง I can’t imagine it.

 

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[Artful Dodger]

Well, the consensus is clearly that it always says /ng/. If it did sometimes says /mg/, it would still be written ง, just as English x sometimes says /ks/ and sometimes /gz/, but is written x in either case.

13 hours ago, digbeth said:

Where in Thailand did you notice this? maybe down south from Chumporn down they have accents and ways of pronouncing things like a lisp that could make you heard it like that?

Chiang Mai - although thinking back, in Skype lessons with a teacher from Phuket, when she gave me a new word and I had to work out the spelling, more than once I had ม at the end when it should actually have been ง.

 

The clearest example I have found online is the sample pronuncation of  ถุง on http://www.thai-language.com/let/182. If you click through though and go to the ถุง page, there is a different sound clip which has the /ng/ sound. I went to YT and looked through a few videos that go through the alphabet, and there were no very clear instances of /mg/, even if some of them were a bit ambiguous.

 

I think the explanation at the end of Briggsy's post is probably the right one, so there isn't much in my original suggestion, but this thread has at least cleared a couple of things up for me.

[JTXR]

Or maybe related to tone?  The speaker may very momentarily close (or very slightly close) lips in the middle of pronouncing the ง with a rising or falling tone?