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

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.

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.

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?


Basilius