Re: USAGE: front vowel tensing [was: English notation]

Tristan Alexander McLeay wrote:
->So the /&/ goes to /ej/? Some american i talk about the phonetics of our
>englishes with claims he uses [&j] (but only allophonic) before /N/,
Deja vu...... we went through this a while back IIR.  The [j] glide here
seems to result from the movement of the tongue from [æ] position to [N]
position.  Similary, many of us have a centralized off-glide [@] in the
sequence /...æn#/ as in "ban".

and
>i have [&i] there too, which means it collapses with /&i/ and is sung as
>/E:/, which means in certain styles of singing (like when singing the
>Anthem), the RP vowels /eI/, /E@/, and {/&/ before an /N/} all collapse
>into the same sound. (And so do /OI/ (my /Oi/), /O@/, /O:/, and /Q:/)>
That wouldn't surprise me.  Lots of strange things happen to any language
when it's sung.  That's why (speaking personally) it's so difficult to
figure out the lyrics sometimes, even if you know the language (as an L2,
that is).  I had a Filipino friend (who spoke excellent Spanish) who could
only figure out about half  the lyrics of some Argentine tangos (granted,
mainly because of the slang, but he even missed some common words, as we
discovered when we saw the lyrics in print).

>And is there a difference between /ej/ and /ei/?
Yes:  /ej/ is one syllable, /ei/ would be two-- _phonemically_ speaking.
Compare /najf/ 'knife' vs. /naijv/ 'naïve'.  Or maybe /pej/ 'pay' vs. /peIN/
'paying'-- but we Americans would write the latter as /pejIN/ I think.
British tradition would have /pe:/,  I'm not sure what they'd do with
'paying'.  /pe:IN/??

Keep in mind that phonemic representations are only symbolic;  the
inconsistency between Brit. and US doesn't really matter (tho it IS
confusing) as long as "/e:/" is understood to represent "the vowel [e] with
an offglide of some sort, i-like in US English, (something else?) in
British."
Even in US phonemics, there were competing ways of representing the offglide
or neutralization of vowels before /r/-- /fihr/ 'fear' springs to mind.  (If
your dialect was truly r-less, you could simply write /fih/, contrasting
with /fij/ 'fee'

One could just as well use numbers or wingdings instead of alphabetic
symbols, which is basically what historical linguists sometimes do as a
first step (or as Ventris did in deciphering Minoan B).  "1" can thus
represent the correspondence (across say 3 langs.)  a - a -e, "2" would
represnet ä - a - @  (one's hypothesis being that _perhaps_  it's ultimately
the same vowel under different conditions).

Why is it that
>americans tend to discribe the diphthongs as ending in a consonant, and
>brits and aussies and others use a vowel? is this just some tradition
>designed to confuse the crap out of me?
Sheer perversity  ;-)

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