Not *that* vowel again! (was: Personal adjectives (was: Fruitful typos...)

At 21:30 -0500 22.1.2000, Steg Belsky wrote:
>
>Not *that* vowel again!
>Most American dialects seem to limit it to an allophone of /&/ before
>liquids:
>"care", "bail".
>The dialect of the NYC Metro Area extends it to other words like "grass",
>"crash", "bad".
>
>I've seen it represented as /E@/, but i've always felt that it starts a
>little bit higher, somewhere probably between /e/ and /E/.
It sounds as [e@] to my foreign ear.  I've seen it represented by American
linguists as [I@], but I think that may be because there is no
monophthongal [e] sound in their speech.  I know one person who pronounces
the land of his birth as ['ke@n@d@], and to my ear it is different from the
/I@/ diphthong in his pronunciation of ['kneidI@n].   I got no idea what
part of Canada this man is from, but it seems this sound does occur before
nasals beyond the NYC Metro Area! :-)

What strikes me with NYC speech is that /&/ seems to be nasalized in all
positions.


/BP

 B.Philip Jonsson  <mailto: bpj@...> <mailto: melroch@...>
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