Re: Uusisuom's influences

At 10:37 pm -0400 1/4/01, John Cowan wrote:
>Yoon Ha Lee scripsit:
>
>> And if a foreign-language speaker produces [u] for both [u] and [U] in
>> English, I have a pretty good chance of understanding him/her, and if
>> his/her pronunciation is a bit off-target--well, I've tried learning
>> other languages and I can't say my pronunciation is perfect, either.
>
>That is because the [u]/[U] distinction has low functional load:
>there are few minimal pairs, and indeed there are many items that
>vary among even closely related dialects.  I remember being
>laughed at for saying [ruf] instead of local [rUf], and yet I was born
>and bred only a few miles away.
Well, yes - IME the distribution of the two phonemes is unstable.  In
Britain, in the north east, the southern /U/ is commonly pronounced [u:],
e.g. [bu:k], [bu:k_h], [bu:x] "book".   Even among speakers of 'standard
southern English' one finds variation.  I grew up pronouncing 'tooth' and
'hoof' as /tuT/ and /huf/, respectively; but I've certainly come across
/tUT/ very often and /hUf/ quite often down here in the south east.

Ray.





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A mind which thinks at its own expense
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