Re: [Re: [IE conlangs]]

John Cowan wrote:

> Tom Wier wrote:
>
> > Which is why Nik originally said that they're homophones in Southern
> > American English, because /E/ just doesn't exist before nasals, except
> > as an allophonic variant of /&/.  (Pronouncing a full /&/ before nasals
> > sounds positively foreign to me! :) )
>
> So you make "sand" like my "send", and both "send" and "sinned"
> like my "sinned", apparently.
Well, more or less.  The lax front mid vowel that exists in Texan (and Southern)
"sand" is actually noticeably lower than the vowel in "let", close enough to [&] that
it remains an allophone of /&/, though barely so.

"Send" is identical to "sinned" for me, but for many people "sinned" has
an extra drawl, such that it's almost /sI@nd/  (or maybe better /sI:nd/).

(There's a funny anecdote I heard recently from a friend about a foreigner
who moved to Texas trying to affect a Texan accent.  This person apparently
went to bizarre extremes to drawl; it sounded something like "Teh-eh-xas", with
a glottal stop (!!) )

> (Of course, I may indeed be a foreigner to a Texian.)
The people at this website think you are in fact a foreigner:

<http://web.texramp.net/~rtxgov/>

They're just bizarre. They claim the US illegally admitted Texas to the Union in
1845, and that as such Texas, a Sovereign Republic, is being illegally occuppied
by a foreign country.  Make sure to check out their comments about US
aggression in Yugoslavia. ;-)  I'm surprised they don't claim land now in New
Mexico and Colorado...

(I know this has nothing to do with the topic... I just thought it an amusing aside :) )

> But I think most, if not quite all, Americans make "been" like "bin",
> not like "bean".
Probly.

=======================================================
Tom Wier <artabanos@...>
ICQ#: 4315704   AIM: Deuterotom
Website: <http://www.angelfire.com/tx/eclectorium/>
"Cogito ergo sum, sed credo ergo ero."

There's nothing particularly wrong with the
proletariat. It's the hamburgers of the
proletariat that I have a problem with. - Alfred Wallace
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