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

Yad help me, I probably shouldn't reply.

John Cowan <cowan@...> wrote:

>Tristan McLeay scripsit:
>
>> (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.)
>
>AFAIK, all Americans pronounce "Mary" as /meiri/; the question is whether
>they pronounce "merry" and "marry" as /meiri/ also.  For me they are
>/mEri/ and /m&ri/ respectively.
  This is not the kind of thing I tend to notice in conversation unless I'm
making a point of picking it out. So I'll test this on a few people around
here (Vancouver), and report the results.
  The way I say it, "Mary" is the same as "marry" and rhymes with "hairy" --
 probably close to [mE:r\i]. "Merry", on the other hand, rhymes
with "ferry", probably close to [mEr\i]. Something like /meiri/ would sound
to me like "may ree", whatever that might mean.
  This would be the only case in which actual vowel *length* matters a damn
in the local 'lect. That is, IF I find other people make the same
distinction here that I do.

>As for "yeah", I've always thought it was a peculiar and perverse
>spelling for the word /jV/.  If I speak it in extreme slow motion,
>it comes out /je:::::V/, but that's bizarre.
This I *know* is /j&/ here (/jV/ would be "yuh", like "yup" without the p).
I *have* made a point of noticing this, as it is the only word in this
dialect that ends with &.

M

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