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

David Peterson wrote:

>>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". >>
>
>    Now wait a minute...  There are people who would seriously pronounce it
>/bæNk/?  I've never even thought of it that way; always as the long /ej/
(or
>/ei/).  And if I stop myself short of the /Nk/ in "bank", I definitely am
>saying /e/, not /æ/.

Sorry.  I was referring to my own speech and that of whoever I was replying
to.

This seems to be a regional difference.  Pronunciation (phonetics) is one
thing; how you express it _phonemically_ is another.  For myself, the vowel
in "bank" is neither that of "bake", nor of "beck" nor of "back"; aside
from, or better because of,  the nasalization, in a precise IPA rendering I
would probably use [E] (epsilon) with some diacritics to indicate lowering
towards, but not all the way to, [æ].  Since that variant quality is
conditioned by the following [N], the decision as to where it fits into the
phonemic system is a little arbitrary.  The classical phonemicists IIRC
called it /æ/.    It's quite possible that some of the distinctive changes
of W.Coast English have taken place in the past 50 years, since the glory
days of classical phonemics (which was the work, mainly, of east-coast and
mid-western professors).  Look at some of the textbooks of the era--
H.A.Gleason, or C. F. Hockett-- and you'll see where I got my initial
training.  (In fact, I took Intro. Ling. from Gleason in 1965, when he was
already fighting the losing battle against the Chomskians.  The snide
remarks and cat-fights were quite amusing.)

I do have phonemic /ey/ in one word-- the surname "Behnke", ['be~N.ki], an
old friend. Contrasts with ?*"banky" or "banking" which would have my weird
"neither E nor æ" vowel.

Question:  does the Linguistic Society of America still sponsor the Summer
Institutes?  These used to rotate between various major Univs'. summer
sessions  and gathered faculty and students from all over the world.
Marvelous experiences.

Reply