Re: YAEPT:Re: Phonological musings (was: Announcement: New auxlang "Choton")

Quoting Joe <joe@...>:

> Andreas Johansson wrote:
>
> >
> >
> >PS A similar oddity is his use of "were" as an example of Elvish 'e', which
> >otherwise seem to be monophthongal - the RPoid English I learnt has [we@]
> for
> >"were". I suppose Tolkien's 'lect differed here; dialectal variation 'tween
> >[we:] and [we@] is, of course, easily believable.
> >
>
> Sorry, but no dialect I'm aware of has [we@] for 'were'.  'where', yes,
> but not 'were'.  'Were' is [w3:], IME
I've never denied the fact I speak a xenolect of English, different from any
English ever spoken by a native speaker. If there's no modern dialect that
pronounces "were" as we were taught, that isn't necessarily surprising, since
that pronunciation is based on more-or-less obsolete forms of prescriptionist
RP. Even if "were" never was natively pronounced as [we@], some prescriptionist
may have concluded it _should_ be.

Anyway, it seems equally unlikely that [w3:] was the pronunciation Tolkien had
in mind.

                                                            Andreas

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