Re: USAGE: English vowel transcription [Re: Droppin' D's Revisited]

Roger Mills wrote, quoting myself:

> > Oh, how I would benefit from a computer that had both Internet access
> > and a sound card!?
>
> Amen to that (at least the sound card part-- for many of us!
Well, participating on the list - not to mention downloading free
phonetics stuff - would be tricky without internet access ... :-)

I *could* - maybe - solve the problem by downloading a phonetics tutorial
onto floppy next time I'm at my parents' house (not *these* computers -
they are for students and therefore crippled) and then taking it back to
my place where I have a computer with sound card. Of course, it would take
quite a few months to do all this, and the only downloadable tutorial I've
ever seen a link for was quite a hefty program!

> The Dutch word _vaak_ (meaning 'hobby', inter alia) can sound very
> naughty, to the careless American ear.
Especially if you connect the Dutch meaning to the English meaning :-)
The name of the Flinders University Choral Society is generally
considered semi-humorous

> Anyway ... so /that's/ what you mean by long/short vowels! It would
> never have occurred to me to suspect that the term 'long vowel' would
> refer to a diphthong, except in a casual non-technical discussion
> where anything could mean anything.
>
> True; it makes linguists' toes curl to  hear that. But 1st and  2nd
> grade classrooms probably aren't the place for 'technical' discussion.
They are, however, the place to teach meanings of words. I know people
sometimes *use* long/short in that casual way, but I didn't know there
existed schools that actually *taught* them to do so!

Speaking of things taught in schools, in mine I could never grasp the
idea of phrases (and how to identify them).

> we don't hear a lot of real Australian here (most recently, there was a
> good 4-part series on Australia on our public TV, written and narrated
> by Robert Hughes, an ex-pat Aussie-- I heard a wide variety of accents
> from his interviewees).
OK, brief overview of Australian dialectal variation.

We have both social dialects and regional dialects. If you read books
about Australian phonetics you'll find that they concentrate almost
exclusively on the social dialects, which are traditionally divided into
'broad', 'common' and 'educated' although most of these books were
written a generation ago and time has moved us, on average, toward the
'educated' end of the spectrum. Characteristics of the broader dialects
are the tendency for [a] to become [O] and for vowels to become
diphthongs beginning with [@]. Of course, there's a whole continuum here.
As for regional dialects, I've seen books written in Sydney that deny
these exist, whereas anything written in, say, Adelaide (my city) will
assert that they do. This shouldn't surprise anyone - Sydney is a major
population centre and therefore has less need to emphasise an identity
distinct from Australia in general - but note again that said books were
written a generation ago. The most famous phonetic differences between
Eastern dialects (which account for most Australians you would have
heard) and the rest of us are that Eastern dialects contain [Ul] (in
words like 'school') while central/western dialects never do - indeed it
sounds exceedingly grating to my ears which is why I outlawed it in my
conlang - and that many words pronounced with [&] in the East (such as
'castle') are pronounced with [a:] by the rest of us. These are just a
couple of examples, but they are the ones that most often cause comment.

Does this help you to interpret what you've heard?

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