Re: Not phonetic but ___???

John C:
> And Rosta scripsit:
>
> > The problem is how to choose which distinctions to blur. Consider
> > THOUGHT, GOAT, FORCE, NORTH, CURE: collapsing all 5 into one would
> > result in too many homographs, but any partial collapse into fewer
> > than 5 is going to run contrary to one accent or another.
>
> I think that FORCE vs. NORTH is clearly dying out in this country,
> though I don't know the situation in the U.K.
Dialect-levelling continually erodes the areas where it survives,
but in those areas it is still maintained by the young.

Amanda:
> Which way does the distinction run between these two?  They sound
> the same to me.
NORTH opener, FORCE closer. In the UK in places where NORTH != FORCE,
NORTH=THOUGHT and sometimes FORCE=GOAT.

John:
> I've always been a fan of merging FOOT and GOOSE; even though
> they're distinct in almost all accents, the functional load is very
> low and there are a huge number of idiosyncratically pronounced words.
That is a good suggestion. It is not prejudicial to any accent, and
as you say, it blurs distinctions (of lexical incidence) between
accents. If I had more time it would be an interesting challenge
to come up with an equitable dialect-neutral orthography for
English along lines such as these.

BP:
> > > > Ah.  What about the [l] in PALM?
> > > No.  Do you actually articulate any [l] there?
> >In careful speech, yes.  Otherwise, there seems to be a sort of
> >l-coloring (palatalization?) of the vowel, analogous to r-coloring.  For
>
> That's probably why Wells replaced PALM with FATHER in the LPD.
I hadn't noticed that. Strictly speaking, PALM is better than FATHER,
dialectologically, since some accents have TRAP or FACE in _father_.
But FATHER would be more perspicuous to a general lay readership.

> There ought to be a keyword CUTE, since this sound varies
> between /ju/ and /iw/, and is arguably a diphthong.
That's one of the things Wells deliberately overlooks in the lexical
sets, because it is confined to S. Wales. /iw/ is a diphthong, but
as for /ju/, it would be counterproductive to treat it as a diphthong,
since its behaviour is so much to the contrary.

--And.

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