Re: Donkey and monkey


ranjit_mathews@xxxxxxxxx wrote:

benlizro@xxxxxxxxxx wrote:
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.

Unless your "Monk Key" and "monkey" are nearly indistinguishable, it
seems possible that you have either [maNNki] or [maN] with different
pitch (F0) from [ki] or both. To see if it is [maNNki], compare your
"hung key" with your "monkey" and "hunky".

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.

Well, from an Indian bias Americans' "funky" sounds normally pronounced
and "monkey" sounds oddly pronounced. It seems to me that monkey is
pronounced like 2 words; i.e., with greater similarity in pronunciation
to "hung key" than to "hunky" but possibly a different intonation from
"hung key".

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

I would rather say that the word 'monkay' has geminated GON syllable.
It is interesting to mention that the alleged Bantu word 'macaque' also
contains M + reduplicated GON. The same morphology could be seen in
Serbian words 'mukanje'/ 'mukati' (bellow, mooing; Gr.
μουγκανιτό, Sp. mugido, Ger. muhen) and 'meketanje' (make a
noise, characteristic of goats); obviously these words were "produced"
onomatopoeicly (muu...) with the addition of the GON syllable. Serbian
word 'majmun' (Gr. μαϊμού, Arab. maimun) had been derived from
the word 'mumljanje'/ 'mrmljanje' (mumble; Gr. μουρμουρίζω,
Ger. murmeln, Sw. mummel).

DV

.

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