Re: tSat: Re: 'tEst 'pli:z ig'nOr\

Roger Mills <rfmilly@...> hat escreut:

 > > > You pronounce "off" with the same vowel as "all"?
 >
 > 'Deed I do. I do not have the cot/caught merger. There was
 > a chance, way back in 1941, that I might have grown up in
 > California...but apparently my father couldn't find a job
 > there. Ow well, je ne regrette rien.

How specifically Californian is LOT-THOUGHT merger
nowadays, anyway?

 >
 > I thought that was
 > > > something only old people with broad Australian or
 > > > Cockney accents
 > > > did. I suppose in America, most bets are "orf" too.
 >
 > How about old US middlewesterners too. :-))))

Yes, you do belong to the oldest cadre of GenAm speakers,
don't you? But again, how common is lack of the LOT-THOUGHT
merger in the youngest cadre?

"T. A. McLeay" <relay@...> hat escreut:

 > All I know is I've heard "Igor" and "Ivan" pronounced with
 > both "long i" and "long e", and I heard the "long i" forms
 > earlier than the "long e" ones so they're my unthinking
 > default in written form...

IIRC Ray Brown once told, on or off list, that his
bilingual grandson calls himself /'aIv@n/ in English and
/ivan/ in French!

The Russian pronunciations are IIANM /'i:g@r;/ and
/I'va:n/ (Yitzik are you listening? You even used to be an
Igor IIRC?)

 > I imagine the nearest vowel in my speech to the Russian
 > vowel is in fact "short i". (The Russian word _ty_ ("you")
 > is sometimes very close to how I pronouce the name of the
 > fourth letter of the (English) alphabet, altho the Russian
 > vowel usually strikes me as broader than I'd aim for...)

Russian has both /i/, Romanized _i_, and /i\/, Romanized _y_
as different phonemes. The Ukrainian equivalent of Russian
/i\/ is however /I/ IIANM. An old Swedish book I read
identified the Ukrainian front vowels Romanized _i y e_ with
Swedish _i e ä_ /i e E/!

/Benedikt

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