Re: THEORY: Ray on ambisyllabicity

Adrian Morgan:
> And Rosta wrote, quoting myself:
>
> > > > > I think I say /hOuli/ for _wholly_ and /hoUli/ for _holy_, noting that
> > > > > /o/ is not [o].
> >
> > Sorry: I failed to notice or register the point you were making. For no
> > good reason I read you as saying the words sounded identical. Now that I've
> > read you correctly, can you clarify how /Ou/ and /oU/ are pronounced, and
> > which other words have these diphthongs. For example, does /Ou/ ever
> > occur not before /l/?
>
> I have a hard time telling [Ou] from [Ow]
One can safely treat them as equivalent, either because they are, or because
the difference between them is empirically insignificant.

> which is why I felt safer using
> phonetic transcription, but the diphthong I'm thinking of is the one
> usually created by {l}, as in _old_, _mold_.
Right. I'd transcribe it [Ou]/[Ow] in Australian E.

> /oU/ as in _ode_, _mode_. The initial vowel could be phonetically
> equivalent to a wide range of things - among them [a], [@], [o] - but
> I've picked up that it's traditional to use /oU/ for diphthongs of this
> type.
I've not seen "/oU/", and it's not very mnemonic for the Aus vowel. I
really don't believe it ever begins with [o]. [a] and [@] seem nearer
the mark. I'm not sure whether the final segment, which is centralish,
is rounded, & can't face having to watch _Neighbours_ in order to check.

> > without worrying about my crap ascii transcriptions, the point is that it
> > is my impression that some Australians have phonetically the same vowel
> > in "too" and "tool" and in "go" and "goal", while other Australians
> > don't.
>
> Indeed! The use of [Ul] at the end of a syllable instantly brands a
> person as being from the Eastern states. But I thought your mother was
> from Sydney. Did she have a more Western network of relatives?
No, in conformity with your dialectological generalization, she has [kul]
for _cool_. This is also like SE English. But she and I say [kuli] "coolie"
[Chinese thingo], [dZuliEt] "Juliet", which is certainly not ordinary SE
English.

> > > Of course, one of the key differences between Eastern dialects and the
> > > rest is that for non-easterners like me, there's a phonetic constraint
> > > that no syllable can end in [Ul]. In the East, no such constraint exists.
> >
> > Tell me more.
>
> No non-Eastern-stater would be caught *dead* saying 'skUl' for school or
> 'kUl' for cool, both of which are common in Sydney, for example. For
> non-easterners, [Ul] can *only* occur if the [l] begins a new syllable. I
> don't know the IPA for the vowel the rest of us use.
I'm a bit confused. [U] is (close to) the vowel you have in _book_ (which is
probably [o]), right? I'd have thought firstly that [U] -- or [u] -- is a
possible realization of /u:/ only before tautosyllabic /l/ in Eastern-Statish,
and secondly that TOO and TOOL in non-Eastern and TOO (but not TOOL) in
Eastern all have the same vowel, phonetically, which is essentially some kind
of high frontish vowel, possibly unrounded, and possibly preceded,
diphthongally,
by a less high, frontish vowel.

Changing topic, can you tell me whether _chance_ has the vowel in _hat_ or the
vowel in _bra/start/grass_?

--And.