Re: YAEPT: track

On 13/06/06, Yahya Abdal-Aziz <yahya@...> wrote:
...
[quoting me]
> > Yahya, you seem to be setting the "reply-to" header. Could you perhaps
> > disable it?
>
> Mmmmm ... how?!
You seem to use Microsoft Outlook, in which case I haven't got a clue.
I've CC:ed this to the list in the hope that one of our friends there
might know, I hope you don't mind.

> BTW, was this intended to reply to the CONLANG list?
> (OK, if so.)
Yes :) I CC:ed the list, which is what I normally do if someone sets
Reply-To. Seeing as I was posting onlist, I used my conlang account,
which sets the Reply-To header, because in spite of claims to the
contrary I can't get Google Mail to stop setting it to *something*.
(As opposed to the other email I sent you, personally, from my
personal account.)

> > I've generally considered it phonemic for me, at least! (At least
> > until I stopped considering the concept of "phonemic" to be useful.)
>
> That's another thread!
:) My Phonetics and Phonology lecturer considers phonemes to be
useful, but allophones not to be, which strikes me as naïvely
intuitive but completely contrary to the way language seems to work.
(She didn't go into detail, but said that phonetic realisations vary
too much in practice for discussions on the topic to be fruitful. But
the example she used only furthered my belief she was wrong!)

...
> > Also, I've noticed that young children (who have not yet mastered
> > clusters, but do have the [tS] affricative) frequently ommit the [r\]
> > entirely and speak of the [tS&in tS&k].
>
> Sure, infants, ie VERY young kids do so.
Older than I'd consider "infant". Maybe I'm confusing the etymology of
the word with its meaning, but if they can speak mostly fluently but
occasionally trip over some clusters/phonemes, can walk unaided etc. I
do not consider them to be infant. (But yes, they'd be pre-kinder
age.)

..
> > (My mother is an English teacher, and I was in year 12 in 2002, which
> > simultaneously seems a long time ago, and like yesterday.)
>
> Hmmm, so you're in Year 16 now? ;-)
Doing the fourth (calendar) year of a four-and-a-half year double degree :)

"Year 12" is old-style "Form 6", if that helps :) (I have no idea when
the form x -> year x+6 change happened though, just that my high
school, being very conservative, kept the form numbers in its class
codes.)

...
[quoting Y.]
> > > If we *are* speeding up our language, then we
> > > would necessarily start to blur, merge and even
> > > lose some articulations, wouldn't we?  That
> > > might account for:
> > > [tr&:k] > [t_ar\&:k] > [tSr\&:k].
> >
> > I'm intrigued as to why you note length in these. There should
> > especially be no length in the last one, if the rate of speech is
> > picking up :)
>
> If there *is* still any length distinction, surely
> it's relative?  I think "track" is long and "brat"
> is short - don't you?
No. "track" and "brat" are both short for me; I only have two words
with a long [&:] before an unvoiced consonant, being "ass" in the
sense of "arse" (showing an approximation of the american diphthong),
and "out", being a degraded/unstressed form of the [&@]/[&O] that I
use when speaking carefully. (/&O/ monophthongises to [&:] also before
(voiced) [r\], but maybe also in some other words/contexts, I dunno.)

Do you find the long [&:] in other similar words? Any of "flack,
crack, pack, sack"?

(Thing about relative length, is that yes, it's relative, but the rate
of speech will pick up if we abandon the length distinction.)

--
Tristan.