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

On 12/06/06, Steven Williams <feurieaux@...> wrote:
> --- 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).
Yes, but the lengthening shouldn't be so much that it influences your
conception of the vowel; it should be purely allophonic. Similarly,
most low vowels are longer than high vowels, so in English a short /I/
is shorter than a short /&/ (though short /e, O/ are the same length,
midway between; in Australian English /a/ is also of the length of /e/
in spite of its height). So the length difference should be similar to
/bId/ or /bIn/ or /fIz/ or whatever.

I've heard that some American dialects use a vowel with quality &
quantity approximately midway between that of /I/ and /i/ for /I/
before /N/ & /r/, similarly /e/ and /E/ approach a midpoint and so
forth with other tense/lax pairs. Are you sure this is not what's

> 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
Yeah, Americans are good like that. Then there's the others that sould
like they say "meck"  [mek] for "make" or "bit" [bit] for "beat"
without a trace of diphthongisation or length. Skaneland Swedish is
the same too, with [Eo] for /o:/ and [i\u] (ish) for /u:/ :)

--
Tristan