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

Somehow, despite the explicit instructions in my subject line,
this has turned into YAEPT.  The sheer power of that
topic is amazing; it's like a black hole sucking in all threads
which get too close to its event horizon.    Obviously my
English phoneme thread started out way too close; I was orbiting
the darn thing.  Anyway . .

On Sat, Jul 19, 2003 at 11:05:59PM -0400, John Cowan wrote:
> AFAIK, all Americans pronounce "Mary" as /meiri/;
> they pronounce "merry" and "marry" as /meiri/ also.  For me they are
> /mEri/ and /m&ri/ respectively.
Most definitely not.  For me, my wife, our tenant, and most of my
friends and coworkers, all three of them are [mE`r\i], with the
same vowel (apart from the rhoticization) as "met", "bled", etc;
as distinguished from the vowel of "mate", "blade", etc.
Other a+r words have the same "short-e" vowel: "bare" (which
doesn't rhyme with the trade name Bayer, which has /ei/),
"care", "dare", "fair", "fare", "hair", "hare", etc.

> As for "yeah", I've always thought it was a peculiar and perverse
> spelling for the word /jV/.
Again, not hereabouts.  "Yeah" is pronounced /j{/; it seems to be a
exception to the rule that disallows lax open monosyllables in English.

> If I speak it in extreme slow motion,
> it comes out /je:::::V/, but that's bizarre.
Here it's more like /j{::::ijV/.

-Mark