Re: The fourteen vowels of English?

Joe said:
> Mark P. Line wrote:
>
>>Paul Bennett said:
>>
>>
>>>I remember reading somewhere that English has 14 vowels (presumably
>>>including diphthongs), but that every dialect collapses at least two of
>>>them together.
>>>
>>>Well, I decided to measure my own lect, and got some surprising results.
>>> I
>>>have at least 17 vowels that I can think of, all of which can appear
>>>between /h/ and /d/...
>>>
>>>
>>
>>You might consider the possibility that some of your examples contain an
>> /r/.
>>
>>
>>
>
> Not in my English.  All of those have no /r/ at all.
That depends on a specific phonological description of your English, not
on the phonetic description of the words in question.

Rather than having no /r/ and winding up with umpteen vowels and numerous
relations with other forms that *do* have /r/ that you need to explain
('bored', 'boring'), you can have /r/'s in appropriate places and predict
the phonetic realization of the words as conditioned by the context of
those /r/'s.


-- Mark

Reply