Re: USAGE: [YAEPT] (was Re: "To whom")

On 28 Jan 2005, at 4.45 pm, Rob Haden wrote:

> On Fri, 28 Jan 2005 16:18:50 +1100, Tristan McLeay
> <conlang@...> wrote:
>
>> Colloquially I say [m&~@~nt@n] or [m&~V~nt@n] or something. If I'm
>> being careful I'm informed it's [m&~O~nt@n], though I used to would've
>> called it [m&~u\~nt@n]. In any case, the first element's significantly
>> more obvious. The first [n] is weaker though, so it might approach
>> [m&~:d@n] in sloppy speech, which is sorta like you [maU?n=] :)
>
> What dialect to you speak?
Australian, with a Victorian accent (the significance of the latter is
that 'celery' and 'salary' are homophones (i.e. /el/ and /&l/ merge (as
[&l]))). If you're scared by the nasalisation, I'm pretty sure that's a
relatively normal feature of englishes, so I've been lead to believe.

>> It definately happens to me with diphthongs (incl. ee and oo as in
>> feed
>> and food), so that 'laid' has a longer vowel than 'late'. Some people
>> will try to mislead you into believing it also happens (IMD) with /&/,
>> but that lengthening there is much more prominent and closer to being
>> phonemic (it's noticeable by linguistic naives and happens to some
>> words but not others); it also doesn't happen according to the same
>> rules as with the diphthongs. I think it there's a slightly shorter
>> allophone of the long monophthongs (/2:/ in err, /e:/ in air, /a:/ in
>> are etc).
>
> Yeah, me too.  "Feed" = [fi:d], "food" = [fu:d], "laid" = [leId] ~
> [le:d], "late" = [let_h] or [le?].  Vowels stay long before /r/, too:
> "err"
> = [E:r\], "air" = [e:r\], "are" = [a:r\].
Sorry, I think I confused you ... I meant of those (err, air etc.) as
samples of words with those vowels, not as cases when the vowel is
short. It's shorter (but still long) in 'cart' [k_ha:\t], but longer in
'card' [k_ha:d], using [:\] to mean semilong.

>> I see no reason why there couldn't be one, but some people might call
>> it a glottal affricative :)
>
> Could be. :b
>
> There's something else I've noticed about my own speech and I'm
> curious to
> see how many others do it.  In active participles of verbs whose stems
> end
> in vowels, do the rest of y'all have glides between the vowels?  I'm
> talking about things like this: "skiing" = ['skijiN] ~ ['skijEn],
> "going" =
> ['gowiN] ~ ['gowEn], etc.
Well, I already have glides in those words; they all contain the
species of vowel known as diphthong in my speech. But in general for
me, hiatus is avoided like the plague. If it can't be done with [r\]
(used after long vowels and schwa), it's done with [j] (used after
non-rounding and unrounding diphthongs including 'ee') or [w] (used
after rounding diphthongs including 'oo', and 'ou' even in broad
speech).

In particular, a word like 'going' can be realised as [gO.w@n] in
particularly broad speech, but it's normally more like [gVu\wIN].
(Along a similar vein, 'hour' I pronounce [&:wa] usually, not something
you could easily divine from the spelling if you weren't familiar with
the English orthography and Australian pronunciation.)

I would be more surprised if no glide was used, TBH.

--
Tristan.