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

On Sat, 30 Jun 2001, tristan alexander mcleay wrote:

> > Not necessarily. Many varieties of Western American English
> > (including the one I speak, and presumably the one Tom speaks)
> > has front vowel tensing before the velar nasal. This means that
> > the vowels in 'peek' and 'pink' are distinguished only by
> > nasality: 'pink' has a nasal vowel and 'peek' does not. Likewise
> > 'bake' and 'bank'.
>
>
> 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/, 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:/)
Yes; /&/ is realized as [ej] before the velar nasal in my
dialect. Singing is not a good test for dialect distinctions or
neutralizations since the singing voice makes different demands
on the vocal tract than speaking. And let's not even get into
the low back vowels; the dialectology of English back vowels is
a nightmare. Even in my own Utah English (where the distinction
between [A/Q] has supposedly been neutralized) the back vowels
still have some surprises.

> And is there a difference between /ej/ and /ei/? 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?
Yes. It's been designed with precisely you in mind.

In my own English transcription practice, I use glide symbols in
diphthongs and reserve a sequence of vowel symbols to represent
vowels in hiatus.

Re-lurking now (I've got work to do),

Dirk

--
Dirk Elzinga                          dirk.elzinga@m.cc.utah.edu

"The strong craving for a simple formula
has been the undoing of linguists."               - Edward Sapir