YAEPT: apparently bizarre 'A's (was Re: YEAPT: f/T (was Re: Other Vulgar Latins?))

On Tue, 21 Feb 2006 21:12:07 -0500, Tristan Alexander McLeay
<conlang@...> wrote:

> On 22/02/06, Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...> wrote:
>> On 2/21/06, Paul Bennett <paul-bennett@...> wrote:
>> > On Tue, 21 Feb 2006 16:43:24 -0500, Keith Gaughan
>> <kmgaughan@...>
>> > wrote:
>> >
>> > >> half hearth
>> > >
>> > > I don't know any dialect of English where these two are a minimal
>> pair,
>> > > rhotic or non-rhotic.
>> >
>> > I have /hAf/ ~ /hAT/. In non-careful enough speech, I can have /A:f/
>> for
>> > both of them.
>
> I'm not sure what the distinction you're trying to draw between /A:/
> and /A/ is, Paul. Could you elaborate, or is it just a typo/thinko?
One's long, the other's short. Maybe not canonically long vs short, but my
sloppy lect includes long(er) vowels and my casual lect pretty much
doesn't, as far as I can tell, at least not contrastively. R-colouring in
my normal speech seems to be qualitative but not quantitative. Partial
lengthening in my sloppy speech seems to be due to loss of initial /h/ in
front of "rhoticized" vowels, whereas vowel-initial words get /?/. It's
plausible the lengthening is subphonemic/allophonic in response to the
lack of /?/.

Casual:
|hat| /hat/ vs |hart| /hAt/ vs |art| /At/

Sloppy:
|hat| /at/ vs |hart| /A:t/ vs |art| /?At/

Warning: I'm not a phonologist, indeed I'm entirely not formally-trained.
I'm just doing the best I can on short notice.

Second Warning: My accent was a bastard (in the technical sense) to begin
with (Milton Keynes native of Harrow stock, with plenty of time in rural
Buckinghamshire). Transplanting it to North Carolina has probably not
helped.



Paul

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