Re: Personal langs and converse of aux

Roger Mills sikayal:

> Jesse S. Bangs wrote:
> >> >There are other oddities, too, in people's phonetic ability.  I can
> >> >pronounce the rounded front vowels without too much difficulty, but I
> >> >can't distinguish [o] from [C>
> >>
> >> West Coast dialect, principally.  But I'd have to hear it to believe it.
> >> Coat/caught?
> >> low/law? sow, sew/saw? row/raw?
> >
> >All of these are [@u] or [Vu] (not sure of exact phonetic value) in the
> >first example and simply [a] in the second.  There may be *very* slight
> >rounding on the vowel, but in that case it would be a falling diphthong
> >[Qa].  In any case, there is no rounded back non-high monophthong in my
> >dialect of English, although there are some monophthongal allophones, like
> >'goal' [gOl] (I think.  It may be [gol], but my problem of course is that
> >I can't distinguish them.)
> >
> Well then, you DO distinguish /o/ [@u] from /C/ [a].   Anyway, I got my
> signals crossed-- Western US tends to merge /C/ and /a/ so that rot/wrought,
> cot/caught, etc. are homophones.  Apparently you have that merger.
Yep.  And the point was not that I couldn't distinguish /o/ from /O/, but
that I could get the *phonetic* pairs [o] and [O] apart, a fact which
remains true.

BTW, that should have been a *rising* diphthong of [Qa], with the [Q] part
barely audible.

Jesse S. Bangs jaspax@u.washington.edu
"It is of the new things that men tire--of fashions and proposals and
improvements and change.  It is the old things that startle and
intoxicate.  It is the old things that are young."
-G.K. Chesterton _The Napoleon of Notting Hill_
Conlanger code: CLI> l%p+++ cS:R:N:H a++ y n18d:6 X+++ A-- E-- L-- N2.5
Idmp k++ ia-- p+ m++ o+++ P d++ b++ Yivríndil