Re: A bunch of phonological questions

--- In conlang@yahoogroups.com, Jeffrey Jones <jsjonesmiami@Y...>
> wrote:
> Some Deep South have (used to have?)
> [a] in Mike [ma:k]
> [a_"] in Mark [ma_":k]
> [A] in mock [mA:k]
> The vowel in pack is, of course, a phonetic diphthong for those
> speakers.
In East Texas in the 1950s and 1960s where/when I grew up, in the
South but not the Deep South, we had
[a] in Mike [ma:k] and
[A] in mock [mA:k]
exactly as Jeffrey has said above;
ours was a rhotic dialect, so we heard
[a_"] as in Mark [ma-"k]
from visitors from a little further south and a lot further east.
But I have never in my life heard anyone pronounce the vowel in "pack"
as a diphthong, in the sense of having two different vowel-qualities;
although I have frequently heard it pronounced with a minimum of two
tones, bi-moraically.
I think people who spoke a non-rhotic dialect otherwise near my home
dialect would have had _four_ different pure "a" sounds.

Tom H.C. in MI