----- Original Message -----
From: "Apollo Hogan" <apollo@...>
To: <CONLANG@...>
Sent: Monday, July 07, 2003 3:54 PM
Subject: Re: THEORY: language and the brain [Interesting article]
> On Mon, 7 Jul 2003, Peter Bleackley wrote:
>
> > Staving Mark J Reed:
> > >On Fri, Jul 04, 2003 at 09:59:07AM +0100, Peter Bleackley wrote:
> > > > I pronounce "book", "look", and "Took" to rhyme with "spook". This
would be
> > > > normal in northern English pronunciations.
> > >
> > >Okay, but how do you pronounce "spook"? :)
> > >
> > >A contrasting pair in my speech is "look" (which which "book" rhymes)
> > >and "Luke" (with which "spook" rhymes). I have personally always
pronounced
> > >Took to rhyme with the former. Which I thought was how at least
Gandalf
> > >pronounced it in the movies, but that could just be because that's what
> > >I was expecting to hear.
> >
> > Let me guess... you pronounce "look" as a near homophone with "luck"? I
don't.
> > It sounds more like "Luke" to me, and does rhyme with "spook".
Presumably
> > we can divide English dialects into length contrastive and tense/lax
> > contrastive.
> > My speech is length contrastive, and so in the table below, words rhyme
> > down columns and contrast across rows
>
> Just to pipe in here, I pronounce all three differently (I like that
> minimal pair, btw)
> look = /lUk/ Luke = /lu:k/ luck = /lvk/
You mean /lVk/, right? Though /lvk/ would be interesting. It's odd, for
people who don't have /U/, /u/ sounds nearer to it. For people who do, it
sounds closer to /V/.
> --Apollo
>
> (My first contribution to an English pronounciation thread :-)
>