Re: Hi there & Blitherings

> RE: Irish.
> Yep, Irish is *very* political back home. And speakers of the native
> dialects consider "government Irish" to be an artificial language and
> resent the way it's thrust at them. Ironically while the gov' see the
> promotion of "irish" as reinforcing cultural identity, the speakers of
> native dialects see it as striping them of cultural identity. The
The topic interests me. I've been to Scotland and England (spent four
years in Scotland in fact) but not yet to Ireland, but I do want,
someday, to witness things there that I've read about in books, not
to mention things I've heard about in songs.

> > Steg Stuttered;
> > Now, a lot of times |u| is pronounced as a diphthong whose first
> > part is [j].
>
> You'd think that wouldn't you? I know I did. But apparently
> phoneticians say rather that the consonant has been palletized.
Which is silly, because most of us think of [j}] as exactly that -
/j}/, that is, the name of the letter "U". We *don't* think of it as
/}:/ modified to [j}] by the previous consonant. At least, we
Australians definitely don't and I don't think anyone else does
either.

(Of course, in Australia we don't go as far as the English do, for
example we say [s}:t] for "suit".)

The things that most stand out about typical American speech to an
Australian are, I think:

  - it being rhotic;
  - "pot" being unrounded (example);
  - "new" not having a [j] in it (example);
  - "man" being [m{@n] rather than [m{n] (example)

I'm coming to the conclusion that my conlang's phonology is the result
of a fusing of cultures one of which had a rhotic phonology and the
other didn't. Probably an invasion or something. That seems the best
explanation of why they have [e8] and [i8] but [6:].

Adrian.