Re: Cloakroom

On 15/05/08 22:26:31, Benct Philip Jonsson wrote:

>
> Now that's pretty important a distinction in meaning to
> place on
> vowel length and a glottal stop!  I guess in accents like
> Tristan's
> the distinction is between [kEn] and [kA:n], which is a bit more
> audible for us poor bastards without a /?/ phoneme in our L1's!
...

"Can't" spoken carefully in isolation /ka:nt/ differs from another word
in Australian English purely by length. Said word has already caused
the replacement of "Count" by "Earl" when it had a different form.

Also, the vowel is a central [a:]. The back vowel [A:] sounds very
much like /O/ to me, no doubt a consequence of hearing American
accents. In fact, after velars the /a:/ phoneme may be more front. And
amongst girls, the /&/ vowel can be quite low, so I wouldn't trust [E]
vs [A:] to always help.

But I've never heard of anyone in Australia confusing the words, so :/
Things that aren't clear in isolation often become much clearer in
context.

--
Tristan.

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