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Re: Future English

From:Rob Haden <magwich78@...>
Date:Wednesday, February 9, 2005, 21:36
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