Re: German and English (was Re: Losing languages ...)

At 07:02 29.9.2003, Ray Brown wrote:

>On Saturday, September 27, 2003, at 09:59 , BP Jonsson wrote:
>
>>At 14:53 25.9.2003 -0400, John Cowan wrote:
>>
>>> > English: *stain  >  *sta:n  >  *stO:n  >  sto:n  >  stOun  >  st@Un
>>>
>>>Of course, the numerically largest dialect is conservative here and
>>>doesn't make it through the last transition.
>>
>>In the early 20th century there were extreme RP speakers (mostly or
>>exlusively male) who even had [E@].  That however was too extreme
>>and receded.
>
>Yes indeed.  But in the colloquial speech of north Surrey, where I now
>live, the sound is entirely unrounded and centralized  [@1] ; to those
>unused to it, "coat" sounds distinctly like "kite"!
It just occurred to me that I read somewhere that
some speakers have [AM] for /AU/ as in _mouth_.
Together with [@i\] for /oU/ that means that
three English diphthongs are now very close in
pronunciation, which will make EngEng even harder
for us poor furriners.


>>I'm of course a bloody furriner and waver between [ow] and [o:]
>>depending on level of concentration.
>
>A lot of native born Brits use [o:]  :-)
>It's normal in "Welsh English" as well as most (all?) regions of
>north England as well as the Scottish Highlands.
The problem is of course that my L1 has only one -u diphthong
/au/ which moreover occurs only in loanwords like _paus_ or _kaos_.

Since I've begun to take care pronouncing THOUGHT words
Americanly with [A] I at least don't do any un-nativelike
confusion of phonemes with /oU/ = [o:].



/BP 8^)
--
B.Philip Jonsson mailto:melrochX@melroch.se (delete X)
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