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USAGE: Kristian on Adrian's vowel disorder (was: RE: [i:]=[ij]?

From:Kristian Jensen <kljensen@...>
Date:Sunday, November 5, 2000, 21:06
And Rosta wrote:
>Kristian Jensen wrote: >>Adrian Morgan wrote: >>>I listen to more British speech than American. Can you offer >>>the British pronunciations of these phonemes? >> >>There are several dialects alone in the British Isles, so I'm >>assuming you mean RP English. I'll have to rely on my own textbooks >>for this though. According to them, the RP English pronunciations >>of these phonemes are: >> >> Phoneme RP English >> /u/ [u:] >> /U/ [U] >> /o/ [@U] > >[u] for /u/ except before /l/ sounds very posh, old-fashioned and actory >(= 'Conservative RP'). Better is [u-].
Aha!! This explains why Adrian doesn't hear the difference between Australian and British /u/. My source was written as an intro to linguistics and may therefore have left out certain subtleties in its transcription of RP English vowels. ------- In another post Adrian Morgan wrote:
>And Rosta wrote: >>Kristian Jensen wrote: >>>Hmmm... now I'm really having doubts as to whats >>>happening before /l/. I need to hear my Brisbane pals >>>again. I suspect your [w:] is really [u-:]. This >>>actually makes more sense now that I think about it. If >>>/l/ has that effect of erasing the [y] glide of long /u/, >>>then [u-y] becomes [u-:] before /l/. >> >> I agree. > ><sigh> > >Hereby totally contradicting And's previous post where he >suggested that /u/ in _moon_ might be [u-]. > >NSW school = [skywl], SA school = [skw=l] > >(assuming [y] for /u/).
I'm more convinced now than ever before that Adrian's [w=] is really [u-:]. Evidence is from And's description of RP English /u/ combined with Adrian's assertian that there is no difference between RP English /u/ and Australian /u/ before /l/. I don't think And was contradicting his own earlier suggestion here at all. Its also important to note that [u-], being a central vowel, is prone to have front or back variants. The difference between NSW and SA pronounciation of "school" is more or less expected. -kristian- 8)