Throughout the primary and general election for the New York City mayor, Andrew Cuomo, among others, struggled with pronouncing the last name of the ultimate winner, Zohran Mamdani, with Cuomo repeatedly rendering it as what sounds like [mɑndɑni], with an unexpected [n] in the coda of the first syllable. While this error quite possibly reflects Cuomo’s apparent disinterest in other people, there is an obvious phonological basis for it. In English, there is a process by which coda nasals take on the place of a following obstruent. This can be seen (e.g., Gorman 2013:75f.) in a few potential alternations: e.g., many theorists derive English [ŋ] from underlying /ng/, and the Latinate negative prefix in- as in i[n.d]ecent has an allomorph im– as in i[m.b]alance. It is also overwhelmingly true of monomorphemic words, with words like pi[m.p]le, sta[n.z]a, or mo[ŋ.k]ey. Of course there are a few exceptions, like pli[m.s]oll and scri[m.ʃ]aw, but as I show in my dissertation, they are quite rare in my sample of 6,619  English monomorphemic words. There are just two examples of [m.d] that CELEX considers monomorphemic: du[m.d]um and hu[m.d]rum. Of course, CELEX is wrong on both counts: both are reduplicative and the [m.d] cluster occurs at the boundary between base and reduplicant.

All of this is a long way to say that it’s likely that Cuomo and others are phonotactically “adapting” Mamdani’s name to the native English pattern. Of course, we don’t normally do that with “non-Anglo” names in English; we tend to render them as faithfully so long as they consist of segments present in the native inventory, modulo unusually complex consonant clusters.

References

Gorman, K. 2013. Generative phonotactics. Doctoral dissertation, University of Pennsylvania.