Re: Elvish ideas ...

Quoting Muke Tever <muke@...>:

> From: "Thomas R. Wier" <trwier@...>
> > Quoting Chris Bates <christopher.bates@...>
> > > I'm checking my pronunciation again... there's definately a long u in
> my
> > > "suit"... "assume" pronounced asu:m feels english but maybe with an
> > > american accent to me... saying prezju:m that feels like a normal
> > > pronunciation to me too...
> >
> > I think Mark's point was that for the vast, vast (vast...)
> > majority of English speakers, vowels are allophonically
> > lengthened before voiced obstruents.  Thus, for a speaker
> > to have a long [u:] before a voiceless obstruent like in
> > 'suit' is contrary to all expectation. It suggests that
> > you have a phonemic distinction of length (/u/ v. /u:/)
> > in addition to one of quality (/u/ v. /U/).
>
> Arent all the tense vowels normally pronounced longer or
> diphthongized in many/most English dialects?   [Well, almost
> all the vowels.  I know I have [i] psilon in some places but
> usually for standard /I/.]
This is not so much the case. In some dialects, there is occasional
lengthening, but usually this can be explained by reference
to other factors, like the distribution before obstruents
discussed above, or constraints placed on monosyllabic words,
which cross-linguistically tend to be lengthened to fill up a
whole prosodic foot. There is certainly no language-wide feature
to that effect, no.

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Thomas Wier            "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
University of Chicago   half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of
1010 E. 59th Street     Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter.
Chicago, IL 60637