Re: Beijing, Zhongguo, etc.

On Mon, Aug 25, 2008 at 7:37 AM, Philip Newton <philip.newton@...> wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 25, 2008 at 12:53, Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...> wrote:
>> YAEPT alert!
>>
>> On Mon, Aug 25, 2008 at 4:31 AM, Eugene Oh <un.doing@...> wrote:
>>> On Mon, Aug 25, 2008 at 1:28 AM, Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> > /E/ does not occur before /n/
........

>>> Additionally I don't understand Jim's comment about the prohibition of /E/
>>> before /n/: "pen", "men", "glen", "fen", "when"...?
>>
>> In some dialects, appaently including Jim's, the above
>> diphthongalization applies before /n/ as well.
>
> My guess would, instead, have been a pen-pin merger: /E/ merging with
> /I/ before /n/ rather than diphthongising. (And leading to
> circumlocutions such as "ink p@n" and "stick p@n" to distinguish the
> two.)
Yes, exactly.  When I said /E/ doesn't occur before /n/ and tends
in borrowings to turn into /i/, I didn't mean that in native words it
diphthongizes (or maybe triphthongizes) like /&/ before /n/, I meant
it's realized as [I]; sorry I wasn't clear.

ObConlang: I do have  /En/ ~ /In/ ~ /&n/ contrast in gzb.

On Mon, Aug 25, 2008 at 7:49 AM, Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...> wrote:

> Yup, that's true of my regiolect, though not my idiolect.  Apparently
> not the case a ways north where Jim is. :)
I don't think I'm much if any farther north than Mark as far as current
lodging goes: Duluth vs., if I recall correctly, Marietta?  both northern
suburbs of Atlanta at roughly the same latitude.  As far as the origin
of my 'lect, well, that's complicated: Atlanta, Decatur, Metairie
(a western suburb of New Orleans) and Decatur again all before
I was 10 years old, leading to a weird, possibly unique idiolect with
combinations of influence from two or more southern dialects that
doesn't sound particularly southern in phonology so much as it does
lexically.   A Welsh co-worker once asked me if I was Irish, and
more than one person over the years has asked me if I was "British".

YAEPT threads come up on AUXLANG from time to time as
well, though not as often as here...:

On Thu, Nov 17, 2005 at 10:39 AM, Thomas Alexander <salivanto@...> wrote:

[quoting me]

>> I think you mentioned that you rhyme "get" with
>> "met"; for me "get" rhymes with "pit", both have
>> /I/ while "met" has /E/, roughly the Vp. |ä|.
>
> I keep forgetting that I've never heard you speak
> English.  Your Esperanto certainly didn't betray your
> region of origin.  From my point of view, that's one
> of the major advantages of sticking to 5 vowels.
> While we all still have accents, they're not blatant
> or such that would hamper communication.
--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/

Reply