Re: Phonological musings (was: Announcement: New auxlang "Choton")

Quoting Ray Brown <ray.brown@...>:

> On Monday, October 4, 2004, at 08:11 , Roger Mills wrote:
>
> > Christian Thalmann wrote:
> >> --- In conlang@yahoogroups.com, "Pascal A. Kramm" <pkramm@A...> wrote:
> >>
> >> Oh, one more thing...  "buy" is actually pronounced [baI],
> >> not [buI].  If you need an English example of [uI], better
> >> use "ruin".
> >>
> > Hmm, that's usually ['ru(w)@n] in all but the most careful (US)
> > pronunciation; British/RP may well vary.
>
> In RP its ['ru.In] - that's the pronunciation I was brought up with. IME
> all pronunciations are disyllabic.
>
> > Given the knowledge of everyone in this group, especially Our Lord of the
> > I., I won't _bet_ that there's no diphthongal [uj] in English, but every
> > ex.
> > I can think of is 2 syllables-- "Louie" "chewy" "buoy" and "hooey, fooey"
> > come closest.
>
> Same here. I am not aware of any English dialect that has [uj] - but as
> English is spoken over such wide areas, I would hesitate to say it never
> occurs - but it must be rare.
Tolkien mentions "ruin" as an example for the Elvish 'ui' diphthong, which might
suggest he pronounced it monosyllabically. OTOH, in a couple of instances 'ui'
seems to be counted as two syllables for the purposes of Quenya stress
placement with concomitant vowel lengthening ... It's been so analyzed, anyway,
by people more into such things than me. I'm, as always, tempted to suggest that
the good Professor simply changed the rules back and forth.

                                              Andreas

PS A similar oddity is his use of "were" as an example of Elvish 'e', which
otherwise seem to be monophthongal - the RPoid English I learnt has [we@] for
"were". I suppose Tolkien's 'lect differed here; dialectal variation 'tween
[we:] and [we@] is, of course, easily believable.

Replies