Re: USAGE: Shaw alphabet (was Re: USAGE: Con-graphies)

--- daniel prohaska <danielprohaska@...>
schrieb:

> To my knowledge, these distinctions are all
> allophonic, though.
Oh, they are. I thought they might be phonemic, when I
was designing an Arabic orthography for English, but I
realized I couldn't find any minimal pairs, so I then
isolated the factors that lengthened and 'broke' /&/
to [&@], and found that, in my dialect, they were
nasals.

> I've communicated to some US speakers who have the
> impression that vowels are "long" before <ng>, so
> that <king> is /kiN/ rather than expected /kIN/. So
> maybe this extends to /ns/ as well and <dance> is
> /dens/ and not /d&ns/. Can any US speakers enlighten
> me on that?
/dance/ for me is [d&@ns].

I speak Southern USAian English natively, though I can
fake a good Midwestern accent when I need to.

When I was first learning the IPA, I kept transcribing
/king/ as [kiN] rather than [kIn]; I later learned
that voiced sounds in general lengthen vowels, so I
was really saying something like [kI:N:], but since
long lax and tense vowels sounded almost alike to me,
I confused the two (and the fact that the final nasal
was also long added to the confusion).

Furthermore, my long /i:/ is actually something like
[Ij]; there's an audible offglide to it. I can't
really think of any vowel in my dialect, outside of
[A], that _isn't_ a diphthong. :p

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