Re: Future English
| From: | Rob Haden <magwich78@...> |
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| Date: | Wednesday, February 9, 2005, 21:36 |
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On Wed, 9 Feb 2005 15:08:38 EST, Doug Dee <AmateurLinguist@...> wrote:
>On the other hand, I can think of some mergers in progress or recently
>completed in varieties of AMercian English that do simplify the phonemic
system and/or lead to homophones:
>
>The merger of /O/ and /A/ in much of the Western US.
>The merger of /I/ and /E/ before nasals in much of the South.
>The merger of /w/ and /W/ for most Americans
>The loss of /h/ before /j/ for many Americans, leading to "Hugo" = "Yugo".
>
>Each of those causes some homophony, but that doesn't seem to prevent the
>change.
Exactly. /W/ is voiceless /w/, right? In my own dialect, /O/ and /A/ are
both /A/ -- "cot" and "caught" sound the same. Before nasals, /I/ and /E/
are hardly distinguished, if at all. But I still pronounce /h/ before /j/,
though weakly.
- Rob