Re: THEORY: Ray on ambisyllabicity

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] 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_.

/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.

> 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?

> > 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.

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