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

----- Original Message -----
From: "Tristan McLeay" <zsau@...>
To: <CONLANG@...>
Sent: Sunday, July 20, 2003 2:42 AM
Subject: Re: 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".
>
> '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.
For me, Mary, Yeah, and Air have the same vowel - [E:]. I would understand
the spellings Mairy, Yair, and Air.