Re: "y" and "r"

Ray:
> At 10:58 am +0100 30/3/01, And Rosta wrote:
> >Ray:
> >> But quite frankly I find the likelihood of mistaking English 'oo' in 'bOOt'
> >> for [y] rather than [u] surprising to say the least.
> >
> >Depends where Daniel's from.
>
> I think not.  Daniel is describing something he is touting as an
> _international_ auxiliary language.  Surely, anyone in their right mind who
> is doing that is going to use forms which non-native speakers generally
> recognize as 'standard'.  I think few outside of the UK - and, indeed, not
> that many inside the UK - will know how /u/ is pronounced in Lancashire!
Oh right. I thought maybe he was describing sounds in terms of his own
accent.

> If I'm reading a description of a language and it tells me that a sound, X
> (X = uninstantiated variable), is pronounced as X in Italian, it would not
> occur to me to think: "Does s/he mean the way it's pronounced in Lombardy,
> or is the Neapolitan sound or mayb the one they use in Sicily?"  I would
> assume, and I guess most others would, that it'd be the way an educated
> Italian speaking what most text books give as standard Italian.
true. But this works better for Italian, because give or take a bit of
variation in the mid vowels, standard Italian speakers tend to be in
agreement on vowel realizations, while this is not so true for English,
and, at least for RP, standard descriptions of the accent tend to be
based on conservative and hence obsolescent varieties. So at least
for English vowels, that formula "the sound in English word X" is always
going to be a rather doomed attempt to communicate a particular phone.

> >Certainly John's earlier declaration that BOOT is [u]
> >in English seems rather americocentric (unlike J himself, of course).
>
> I hardly think so - it the standard RP sound also and, indeed, is IME
> normal thoughout Wales and southern England.
I don't know about Wales; I don't meet many Welsh people. In southern
or at least southeastern England [u], except before nononset /l/, is
rather unusual, I think. It occurs in posh-sounding Conservative RP
and in Black London English, but not in 'Estuary'.

> In any case, it would seem that Daniel considers /U/ to be closer to
> Finnish /y/.   What British regional accent is that??
I can only think of young lower-middle-class speakers from Sussex,
with [Y] for the FOOT vowel. (I don't know if all young LMC speakers
from Sussex have it, but the couple that have passed through
my English Dialects class did...)

--And.