Re: Advanced English to become official!

I assume Andreas intended this for a  general audience...

---- Original message ----
>Date: Sun,  3 Apr 2005 02:20:26 +0200
>From: Andreas Johansson <andjo@...>
>Subject: Re: Advanced English to become official!
>To: trwier@uchicago.edu
>
>Quoting Thomas Wier <trwier@...>:
>
>> > >-Curious: Why did you use "ae" for schwa, rather than "a",
>> > > when you use "a" for carrot [V]?
>> >
>> > I chose this to distinct between normal a and schwa. The carrot
>> > [V] is just a short a, so I wrote it as such.
>>
>> In most dialects of English, including the English spoken by most
>> nonnative speakers whose use you value so highly, there is no
>> phonemic distinction the carrot [V] and the schwa [@].
>
> Hm. I'm not sure that's true of the RPoid Englishes that are traditionally
> taught in European language classes. Can't seem to think of any minimal
> pairs, tho.
>
> A candidate could be the negating prefixes _an-_ [@n] and _un-_ [Vn].
> I suppose it's arguable that they're phonemically /&n/ vs /@n/,
I don't think you can say that _an-_ has an underlying representation
with /@/.  The schwa allophones of /&/ are all predictable based
on the usual nonstressed vowel reduction processes:  _anaphora_ [@'n&f@r@]
vs. _anaphor_ ['&n@for] (_ana-_ works the same way as negating _an-_).
I suspect the real difference between "cut" and "anaphora" has more to
do with vowel-length than anything qualitative.

> but
> the contrast is still realized as [@] vs [V] whether or not we recognize
> separate phonemes /@/ and /V/ or not.
I wasn't arguing they're phonetically identical, only for
the lack of a *phonemic* contrast (i.e., one at the underlying
representation).  I should also say that one phonologist professor
I knew told me as much that for many English speakers there is no
contrast.

>Now, I won't pretend to know what proportion of non-native speakers have had
>such phonologies inflicted on them.
I should probably admit that my claim to that end was rather more
impressionistic and anecdotal than empirical.  In my experience,
nonnative speakers tend to have problems realizing stressed [I]
and [U], but more rarely with [V].  Typically, if they have
problems with [V], e.g. by realizing it as a short [a], then
they tend to treat both [V] and [@] positions the same, which
suggests a basic lack of contrast. (This of course is not
rigorous proof of the fact, though.)

 =========================================================================
Thomas Wier	       "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
University of Chicago   half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of
1010 E. 59th Street     Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter.
Chicago, IL 60637

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