Re: Allophone Problem
| From: | Philip Newton <philip.newton@...> |
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| Date: | Saturday, June 9, 2007, 11:03 |
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On 6/9/07, David J. Peterson <dedalvs@...> wrote:
> And there was one other... Probably the meet/meat one (where
> the two, pronounced identically for most English speakers, split
> in a particular dialect group in Great Britain, evidence that there
> was, indeed, a near-merger, and not a full merger, between "meat"
> and "meet" [otherwise the split would be impossible]).
Did the two split? Or merely fail to merge?
I ask because a number of things which sounds the same to me are
separate in other dialects, it seems, but because of a failure to
merge rather than a split -- for example, wait/weight, or (IIRC)
pain/pane.
Cheers,
--
Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>
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