Re: OT: Two countries separated by a common language

Mark J. Reed wrote:

>I have personally partaken of Nutella within the borders of the US,
>but I have not tried to purchase it, so I don't know how hard that might
>be. :)
>
>
You should!

>So the /E/->[&] only happens before /l/, then.  Interesting.
>
Yes. Except that the original phoneme is closer than /E/ (i.e. it was
/e/). Or I guess there might be a chance it never got closer in
Melbourne but did in the rest of the states and then in my generation it
separated and merged with /&/.

>>Americans with all their funniness of
>>/E/ or /&/ before /r/ is noticeable;
>>
>>
>What funniness is that?  Examples like my "paragraph"?
>
Oh, I just meant funniness in the sense of 'different from the way I
speak' (with examples like your 'paragraph').

>>Well, I've got the full range of /&/, /e/ and /e:/ before /r/.
>>
>>
>Hm.  No [&] or [e] before /r\/ in my idiolect; always [E] ("care") or
>[A] ("car").
>
Well, my [e] is no doubt the equivalent of your [E] for most intents and
purposes. For example, 'get' is [get]. Normally it causes no troubles;
occasionally, Americans sound like (to me) they're using [&] as their
short e or [E] as their short a, but I've never got confused by it.

>On a slightly related note, my wife mocks me because I pronounce
>"measure" as ["meiZ@`r\] instead of ["mEZ@`r\]; it doesn't rhyme
>with either "treasure" or "pleasure", both of which have the
>[E].  I don't know why that is.
>
>
If I tried saying [meiZ@], people would tell me it's not pronounced with
a long 'e' :) (A friend of mine introduced herself as [gr\eis]. Because
she was speaking in an otherwise normal Australian accent, I thought she
was calling herself 'grease'. Apparently she does it all the time,
though... for some reason, she can't pronounce her own name properly :)
) (Long a is [&i], long e is somewhere on the continuum
[ij]~[Ii]~[@\i]~[@i] and so when in the context of an Australian accent
[ei] sound most like [@\i]. It would be nice of it to become [ei] (from
which it could become [e:] and undo some of the damage done by the Great
Vowel Shift), but that's unlikely I would think. Long i is [6:\j] or
[A:\j], but I'm lazy and write it phonemically as /ai/. /e:/ is a
phoneme unto its own, the child of long a + /r/: [*A:r > *a:r > *E:r >
*e:r > *e:@ > e@ > e:], and shares the distinction with /8:/ (er/ur/ir)
of being the only phoneme to originate from r-droppers of the past.)

--
Tristan                  <kesuari@...>

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