Fair enough; but hang-er, sing-ing *is* the conventional analysis. English, generally speaking, defies the convention of preferring onsets to codas.
My understanding is that, generally, English does not, in fact, defy this convention, known as the Onset Maximization Principle. Those two examples just happen to involve the consonant "ng", which is never syllable-initial in English.
Of "be-f***ing-hind", etc., Peter Kirk wrote:
It doesn't work to add that other word in this case because it already ends in ng; and anyway that word tends to go where there is a morpheme break, because it is a syntactical rather than a phonetic phenomenon.
This phenomenon is known as Expletive Infixation and is in fact a phonological phenomenon, I believe. Expletives seem to be insertable only between metrical feet (the foot is a phonological unit of structure in between the syllable and word levels). A common example is "fan-bloody-tastic". This is actually observed among English speakers, while "fantas-bloody-tic" is not. (Google for both, and you'll only find the latter as a counter-example in a few morphology texts.)
I actually don't think anyone would really say "be-f***ing-hind" - it doesn't sound that natural to me. And, in fact, there is no foot boundary there. English has very few words with two syllables and two feet. My linguist friend supplies me with one example, "Aztec", which does indeed seem more susceptible to Expletive Infixation than "behind".
- John Burger MITRE
