Re: OT: Definitely Not YAEPT: English phoneme inventory?

On Sat, 19 Jul 2003, Doug Dee wrote:

> How does M-W reflect the 3-way merry/marry/Mary distinction?
> (Around here, "merry" has the vowel of "pet" usually labeled /E/, "marry" has
> the vowel of "pat", usually labeled /{/, while "Mary" is distinct from both.
> Some people say it has the same vowel as "ace"  (which you gave as /e/ but
> which I'd rather call /ej/ or the like), but that doesn't work for me since I
> think "yeah" has the Mary vowel & it doesn't sound like "yay".
You be English or other non-rhotic speaker then? (i.e. you say cah.) Our
vastly superior :) dialects improved the vowelspace when /r/ was banished
to pre-vowel positions by, among other things, turning instances of the
vowel equivalent to /ei/ (but it was monophthongal then) before /r/ into a
brand new phoneme usually known as /E@/. (One presumes that it had a
similar value before /r/ was dropped, and in the dropping of /r/, no other
change was made, so what was formally /feir/, pronounced [fE@r], became
/fE@/ pronounced /fE@/. This explains why 'prayer' is so far removed in
pronounciation from 'pray'---it harmlessly but foolishly became a
monosyllable and then fell prey to the reassignments. Yet no-one was
interested in respelling it to 'prair' and so it's had to suffer ever
since.

'Yeah' is a bit of a funny word. In non-rhotic dialects, it tends to fall
in with the /E@/ vowel (so in my dialect where /E@/'s become a
monophthong, it's pronounced [je:] and seems like Early ModE 'yea' coming
back to haunt us). In rhotic dialects, it doesn't have such a phoneme to
fall in with (because such a phoneme is either /ei/ or /E/ followed by /r/
in these dialects). So it does horribly evil things like be pronounced
[&:], which normally requires a following consonant. This in spite of the
fact that I think 'yeah' came to non-rhotic dialects as borrowings from
rhotic ones. So 'yeah' is phonemically one thing in some dialects and
phonemically another in others and is not a good way of discussing sounds
cross-dialectally.

(So, in short, for you, Mary is probably /mE@ri/ (RP) or /me:ri/ (GAus)
or something like that. In American English, it's one of /mEri/, /m&ri/
or /meiri/, depending on how they split their phonemes.)

 --
Tristan                  <kesuari@...>

Yesterday I was a dog. Today I'm a dog. Tomorrow I'll probably still
be a dog. Sigh! There's so little hope for advancement.
                -- Snoopy

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