Re: Orthography help needed

From:    Ray Brown <ray.brown@...>
> On Friday, April 9, 2004, at 01:25 AM, Tim May wrote:
> > A final /D/ after a short vowel is extremely unusual in English and
> > the natural pronunciation of |eth| is surely /ET/.
>
> Eh? 'with' /wID/ seems _very_ common and usual to me. /wIT/ I've
> encountered only in Scots English. Certainly in southern England & Wales
> it's /wiD/ and IME this pronunciation is pretty common in other anglophone
> areas.
It's not clear to me which of the two is more common in
North America. I naturally use [wID], but I know I have
not infrequently heard [wIT] before.  But I know I pronounce
"eth" as [ED], and have never heard it pronounced otherwise
by anyone else, either, linguist or not.

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Thomas Wier	       "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
University of Chicago   half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of
1010 E. 59th Street     Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter.
Chicago, IL 60637

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