Re: YAEPT: Voiceless TH in whether, worthy

Hello all.  I cannot guarantee that this will be the return
from a long hibernation in dissertation-land.  We'll see.

Rei Braunma dagvic'era
> Nor is [r\=] a normal British rendition of the stressed vowel + possible
> /r/ (pronounced in some British varieties). [r\=] is surely 'Merkan.
> Whether medial /T/ occurs in any 'Merkan varieties I cannot say -
> obviously if it does it must be a dialect variant.
This Merkan has certainly never heard it.  IME, the only exception
I can think of off the top of my head that is not a recent loan or
synchronically polymorphemic is "brothel" which only nonnative speakers
pronounce as /brOD@l/.

da Markus Ridma agretve dagvic'era:
On 11/11/06, Jonathan Knibb <jonathan_knibb@...> wrote:
> > In fact, the only (synchronically) monomorphemic words the OED can find
> > ending with /-T@/ in standard British English are 'author', 'naphtha'
> > and 'panther', and perhaps 'ether' and 'plaza'.
>
> Really?  There are British speakers who pronounce "plaza" as in
> Iberian Spanish?  Weird.
Not really -- they do, afterall, live thousands of miles closer
to Iberia than to Mexico or Argentina.  Ever seen the Monty Python
sketch about the Spanish Inquisition?  In the intro, they talk
about the reign of terror perpetrated by Cardinal Ximenez /himenET/.
And IME most Brits pronounce "Ibiza" as /aibiT@/ or /IbiT@/, where,
locustlike, they teem along its pristine shores much as Americans do
in Cancun and Acapulco. What *is* weird is how my brother, not long
returned from Valladolid, must quickly revert to Tejano accent lest
he be laughed out of every job he tries to find. :)

BTW, does anyone know what happened to John Cowan?

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