Re: þe getisbyrg adres

On Wed, 2004-08-04 at 17:21, Philip Newton wrote:
> On Tue, 3 Aug 2004 22:23:54 +0200, Benct Philip Jonsson <bpj@...> wrote:
> > Hence also the preserved distinction between the
> > THOUGHT and LOT vowels, and the merging of FATHER with TRAP
> > rather than LOT! :)
>
> Where did you get the words THOUGHT, LOT, FATHER, TRAP from? Is there
> a sort of standardised set of words to illustrate certain vowels?
>
> For example, the merger of "THOUGHT" with "LOT" I've usually heard
> described as the "caught-cot merger", rather than "thought-lot", for
> example.
>
> Or did you make up the example words yourself?
AFAICT, they're just made up.

In the case of 'father', as far as I know it's a word in a class of it's
own (dialects with flat a (trap) in class generally still have the broad
a (father) in father, so that whereas father and rather rhyme for me
there's people they don't rhyme for...).

[on horse vs hoarse]
> Does anyone know roughly which regions differentiate those vowels, and
> how the difference would be notated in (C)XS? Or know any other
> example words making the difference and what causes the difference?
>
> That is, what determines which words have the "horse" sound and which
> words have the "hoarse" sound? Etymology? Spelling? Tradition?
> Randomness?
In older non-rhotic Englishes, hoarse had a diphthong [O@] whereas horse
a monophthong [O:]; this was the first known centraling diphthong to go.
IIUC, in some (perhaps older) American dialects, there's a distinction
between /Or/ (i.e. aw+r, no doubt 'horse') and /owr/ (i.e. long o + r,
no doubt 'hoarse').

The distinction is based on etymology: Long o's + r get one vowel
(/O@/), short o's + r get the other (/O:/). Exactly the same process
that determines that 'er' is pronounced \RR\* and 'air' is pronounced
\AIR\**. (Note: erV, where V is a vowel, isn't always \RR\.)

*  i.e. however your dialect pronounces 'er'. Oooooh, circularity!
   The backslashes are my notation for random superenglish phonemic
   notation in which random symbols are used to represent something
   which people can perhaps understand. Essentially, no doubt, a
   regularised form of the English orthography trying to be as maximal
   as reasonable, but not as maximal as possible.
** i.e. however your dialect pronounces 'air'.

--
Tristan <kesuari@...>

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