Re: English notation

On Fri, 29 Jun 2001 03:31:23 EDT, David Peterson <DigitalScream@...>
wrote:

>    In my dialect, I can't have any "short" vowels before /N/ or /r/ except
>for I can have /Er/, as in "air".  I say /i:NglIS/, definitely, and mostly
>/r@laj/.  I totally disagree with all those "rules" that say words like
>"singer" are pronounced /sINr=/, or, even worse, /sINgr=/, and that "fear" is
>pronounced /fIr/.  No way!  If anything, "fear" has two syllables in my
>dialect: /'fi.jr=/.  So, where's everyone else?  I guess I'll read the rest
>of these e-mails and see.
I can't have any _"long"_ vowels before /N/ (although I do have the
diphthong oi before /N/ in a handful of words) -- thus, I've used long
vowels before /N/ as features of alien languages to distinguish them from
English. "Randarong", the name of a city, is natively pronounced
/'randaro:N/ (not /'rænd@rON/ as it would be in my English pronunciation).

I have "short" vowels only before intervocalic /r/ (the word "sorry"
/'sQri/ is the only one that comes to mind, but it's possible there are
others). Other vowels before /r/ are so different from non-r-colored vowels
that for a long time I accepted the traditional idea that they're really
the "short" vowels. But I think they're more intermediate between the
"short" and "long" vowels, and a bit closer to the "long" ones. In
particular, the /or/ in "story" contrasts with the /Qr/ in "sorry". I also
distinguish between one-syllable "sear" /sir/ and two-syllable "seer"
/si@r/, although this may be an idiosyncrasy. (note that I don't actually
pronounce "long" vowels longer than "short" ones)