Donkey and monkey



I've suddenly become aware that in my English "donkey" and "monkey"
seem to have a geminate /k/. At least, "donkey" is not an exact rhyme
with "honky" or "shonky", and "monkey" is not an exact rhyme with
"funky" or "flunky". And that's what the phonetic difference seems to
be.
Should I worry?

It reminds me of the fact I think I mentioned here a few years ago,
that I have geminate /t/ in "thirteen" and "fourteen". I doubt if the
two cases are related, except insofar as they show how phonemic
differences in the shape of common words can persist for years
unnoticed.

Of course geminates are common in English when two of the same
consonant come together at a morpheme boundary, as in "hot-tub" or
"sackcloth". But I don't see any such explanation for these cases. I
don't even have my pronouncing dictionaries here at the moment, so I
don't know whether these pronunciations are recognized variants.
Anybody know?

Ross Clark

.



Relevant Pages

  • Re: Donkey and monkey
    ... Should I worry? ... It reminds me of the fact I think I mentioned here a few years ago, ... Doing the same thing with the way my internal aural memory presents "monkey" might be said with some English accent or others (I know you're from New Zealand but I don't have a ready supply of NZ corpus in my head) I feel a similar catch, ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: Jesus is LORD
    ... WDJW, do not worry. ... That reminds of the famous Mr. Neuman, whose motto was "What, me ... Life is more than food, ...
    (sci.med.cardiology)
  • Re: OT::My weird cat
    ... Don't worry, I wouldn't think of hurting her. ... (reminds me of some of those weird hospital emergency room stories ...
    (rec.food.cooking)
  • Re: Aaughh Department II
    ... when we walk from one end of the house to the other so we'll remember ... Here's my three point plan to help cope with short term memory loss..... ... If you forget something and nobody reminds you or points out that you ... Don't worry about it.....but then you wouldn't ...
    (rec.crafts.textiles.quilting)