Re: USAGE: S. Australian (was: Re: Gz^rod|in)

Basilyus (Basilius):
> On Fri, 24 Mar 2000 01:53:26 -0000, And Rosta <a.rosta@...> wrote:
>
> <...>
> >I can confirm what Adrian is saying. I have in my accent a phoneme
> >/Q:/ which occurs ONLY IN THE SINGLE WORD _gone_.
> <...>
> >I have never had the opportunity to consult
> >other Australians about this feature, but I'm rather excited to find it
> >thus confirmed by Adrian. Obviously it's a point of some theoretical
> >interest that it is possible for a phoneme to occur in only a single
> >word.
>
> - Extremely interesting!
>
> The only idea that comes to my mind is that such 'single-word' phoneme
> might fill in some gap in the phonemic system.
I don't know -- my impression is that language is fairly tolerant of
minor quirks. Quite a lot of people have obligatory [x] in _loch_ and
no other words (Bach, maybe), for example.

> It reminds me of some languages acquiring short counterparts to the long
> vowels they already have (or vice versa), and thus restoring the symmetry
> between the subsystems of short and long vowels in their vocalism.
Possibly. But the restriction to a single word is

> For example, Czech acquired long [o:] in parallel to short [o], and
> Lithuanian has short [o] and [e] which occur only in loanwords.
>
> Can it be said that AuE has a tendency to restore the parallelism between
> long and short vowels?
>
> At any rate, AuE does look a bit richer than other varieties of English
> in vowel pairs mainly opposed quantitatively. Can you confirm or
> refute this?
Well, maybe, but not necessarily more than other accents. Besides on/gone,
there's the distinctively Aus hut/heart contrasting in length alone.

Somewhat haphazardly among English speakers, but certainly Aus is one of
the places where it tends to occur, /&/ has split into /&/ and /&:/, so
lad/mad don't rhyme (for me - the incidence of /&:/ varies among speakers/
dialects). A minimal pair is bade/bad.

On the other hand, plenty of other accents have minimal pairs distinguished
by vowel length alone. In various Eng accents ken/cairn, piss/pierce.
In various northern Eng accents yon/yawn, fit/fate, get/gate, good/goad,
foot/fought, at/art. In various southern Eng accents hut/hurt, hot/heart.
Of these, I think foot/fought is the only one AusE might share [tho with
something like [o] rather than the [O] in northern E), tho I'm not sure.

ObConlang, as I mentioned in a recent message, my subsidiary conlang,
'Breersh', a future British English, has developed the following
vowel inventory

    SHORT       LONG
               i  y  u
  e   3   o    e  3  o
  E   a   O    E  a  O

The guiding principle behind Breersh is that it be plausible, given the
state of the lg in 2000. Some of the above-mentioned minimal pairs occur in
Breersh:
     e - piss/pierce (/pe^s/, /pes/);
     E - ken/cairn (/kE^n/, /kEn/);
     3 - bun/burn (/b3^n/, /b3n/) [hut/hurt are both /x3/, due to T-loss
         with compensatory lengthening in syllables that end up open];
     a - lad/mad (/la^z/, /maz/);
     o - hood/hoard (/Ho^z/, /Hoz/) [foot/fought are both /Ho/<*>];
     O - hod/hard (/xO^z/, /xOz/) [hot/heart are both /xO/].

[<*>I can't be sure that _foot_ is actually /Ho/ rather than /fe/ or /Hy/,
because many words with /U/ in 2000 British E, ended up in Breersh with short
/e^/ or /y/, with the residue forming the small class of words with short /o^/.
I haven't yet worked out the details or conditioning factors for the
trajectory of /U/ words.]

--And.