Re: THEORY: Vowel shift (was: THEORY: Storage Vs. Computation)

On Sat, 19 Jun 1999, Raymond A. Brown wrote:

> As far as southern England is concerned, this is rather dated & not true of
> current English.
>
My material on sound change in that part of the world tends to be limited.

> I'm sure what sound you mean by {aeu}; if you mean [Eu] then that is hardly
> modern change.
[Eu] is probably more accurate.
>
> pronunciation general among the latter (and my pronunciation), it is true,
> is [&u] rather than [au].
>
Same with mine.

> I don't know quite what [ei] -> [aei] is but it looks remarkably like the
> triphthong devotees of Australian soaps operas know well from the habitual
> greeting "G'daigh!"  :-)
>
That would be correct.  G'day is a perfectly good salutation among
Australasians.

> Now Ozzie English is, I admit, showing some interesting vowel developments
> - at least as we hear it on the soap operas.  But, unless the afficionados
> of 'Neighbours' and 'Home & Away' exert undue influence, I don't think
> we'll be following along those lines.
>
Australians tend to be much broader, New Zealand dialects more
conservative (more tongue-tied to our origins).  I remember reading a
quote some years ago that NZ English showed trends that standard English
pronunciation could be expected to follow.  I wondered then how the
logistics of that could work, so I will conclude that the dialects of
Hypernotian English are diverging from its Hyperborean origins,
international media trends notwithstanding.

- andrew.

Andrew Smith, Intheologus                       hobbit@earthlight.co.nz

        Lo! thy dread empire, Chaos! is restored;
        Light dies before thy uncreating word:
        Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall;
        And Universal Darkness buries All.
                        - Alexander Pope, The Dunciad, Book IV.