echt wrote:What's odd is that the N is pronounced in "autumnal", "damnation", "solemnize", "hymnal", "columnist", but never pronounced in "damning", "hymned", "columned".
It may seem odd just looking at the orthography, but */hɪmnd/ and */kɒləmnd/ seem even weirder to me from an English-phonology perspective than */kɒləmn/ on its own. And the hypothetical pair /hɪm, *hɪmnd/ would also be a very odd relationship between past and present verb forms for English.
Regarding the -ing form, this verb form can always be formed regularly in English by appending /ɪŋ/ to the bare infinitive of a (non-defective) verb, without any stem changes. It would be weirder IMO if these verbs had two distinct stems, one with a dropped consonant and one that included the consonant. That's a common pattern in French verb morphology, but it's not at all normal for English verbs.
I would say the <n> in the verbs is purely orthographic, but if you try hard enough you could probably create some bullshit synchronic analysis that it's not expressed yet somehow underlyingly there
à la "The Sound Pattern of English".
Oh, here's another word for the thread: "phonemic".