Re: YAEPT:Re: Schwa and [V]: Learning the IPA

-----Original Message-----

Mark J. Reed wrote:
> On 6/14/06, R A Brown <ray@...> wrote:
>
>> Yep - [U] or [V] is quite distinct from [@] for most of us Brits.
>
>
> You keep mentioning [U] and [V] together - are they merged for you?  I
> know they are for some, but I thought it was a Scots thing.
From: Joe
"Scotland, and half of England has [U] or [u] in place of [V]."

Joe, Mark,
The northern half of England - yes - most definitely, though it's not a
merger - the phoneme /U/ never split. The southern dialects (which were
subsequently carried across the Atlantic to form one of the phonological
bases for American English) split ME /U/ to /U/ and /V/. As with many such
splits /V/ must have started off as an allophonic variant. I also believe
that phonetic [V] in RP is secondary and that the original allophonic
complementary variants were [U] ~ [@] (and that American English is
phonetically conservative in this respect).

ME /U/ became [@] in Southern England except in the environment of preceding
labials or following [l] or [S], later loan words and reading pronunciation
of "book words" aloud for [@] in theses environments also. The establishment
of these loans and learned terms allowed for the formally allophonic split
to become phonemic.

In southern England new stressed /@/ became [V] in ca. 18th c.

As far as I know Scots and Scottish English both distinguish /V/ and /U/.

Like US English, Scottish English does not have phonemic vowel quantity
(examples from Hughes/Trudgill, "English Accents and Dialects", Newcastle
1992):

/i/ 	bee, beer, seedy, meet, meat
/I/	pit, bird, fir, city
/e/	bay, plate, weight, their, mate
/E/	pet, fern, there
/a/	bard, hat, dance, daft, half, father, farther
/O/	cot, caught, paws, pause, paw, pot, Paul, doll
/o/	pole, boat, board, nose, knows
/V/	putt, fur
/u/	pull, put, boot, poor

/ai/	buy
/au/	bout
/oi/	boy

Dan