Re: "y" and "r"
| From: | Raymond Brown <ray.brown@...> |
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| Date: | Saturday, March 31, 2001, 16:55 |
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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!
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.
>In some places (e.g. Lancashire) Eng BOOT is
>decidedly frontish, while in other places it is centralish but frontish
>relative to FOOT.
I'm well aware of that. As you will see in my reply to Matt when he
suggested that Daniel was thinking in terms of (Lowland) Scots, I'm also
aware that high rounded font & central pronunciations are used for /u/ in
the Scottish lowlands - and also, of course, in northern Ireland. But it
seems bizarre to me to describe a would-be universal language on a list
with readers from around the world in terms of some regional British
variant of English
>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.
In any case, it would seem that Daniel considers /U/ to be closer to
Finnish /y/. What British regional accent is that??
Ray.
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A mind which thinks at its own expense
will always interfere with language.
[J.G. Hamann 1760]
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