Re: CHAT: The King of Glottal Stops Reigns Supreme!

Nik Taylor ghItlh:

: Clint Jackson Baker wrote:
: > I have a very
: > "globalized" accent, having picked up things from a
: > lot of different states and countries, and it drives
: > people nuts trying to figure out where I'm from.
:
: Same here.  :-)  I've heard guesses including England, Australia, South
: Africa, Germany, and "Eastern European", among others.

Funny thing is, even though I am Aussie born, so are my parents and
grandparents, and the only time I have been overseas was to NZ when I was 1,
everybody says I have an accent!  I mean, I have spent my entire life in the
same ordinary, Sydney suburb, and its not even on the North Shore....
I've had English, Canadian, South African, New Zealander, American, and even
Swahili (admittedly, the last one was meant as a joke, but still....)
I didn't go to a posh school, and my parents are ordinary middle class, and
speak ordinarily, so where on terra did I get this accent?  Was it from
watching too much Muppets as a child?  Or maybe sucking the lead out of
pencils?  I wonder if people can come up with an explanation....

: I have some odd features, like "remember" and "December" *don't* rhyme
: for me.  I say /ri'mEmbr=/ but /di'sImbr=/.  Remember is one of the very
: small number of words in my idiolect that violate the general Southern
: trend of /E/ -> /I/ before nasals.

They don't sound exactly the same for me either....  Which is kinda strange
since Aussies have a notorious habit if pronouncing every vowel as schwa :)
So for a typical Australian, it would be pronounced as /r@m@mb@/ and
/d@c@mb@/  Hmmm.... so perhaps we should just forget writing vowels
altogether and stick with consonantal trigraphs.... ;)

: Also, I'm not sure if this is idiolectal or dialectal, it's tough to
: say, but I definitely have /i/ in words like "sing".  It is a perfect
: minimal pair with "seen".  It has, AFAICT, the exact same quality and
: length as the vowel in "seen", whereas "sin" both has a different
: quality and is shorter.  There was a thread about that some time ago.

Sorry, for me all three have different vowels....

John.


Windows NT crashed.
I am the Blue Screen of Death.
No one hears your screams.

^^^  The above is haiku if anyone has noticed....

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