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Re: Sound Shifts

From:Raymond A. Brown <raybrown@...>
Date:Tuesday, April 20, 1999, 18:50
At 9:32 am -0400 20/4/99, John Cowan wrote:
>Raymond A. Brown wrote: > >> When I was young I >> pronounced 'towel', 'tail' & 'tell' as homophones, namely: [tEw]. > >"Tail" and "tell" just sound like phonological accent differences, >but [tEw] for "towel" sounds like a genuinely lexical dialect >difference. Are there other examples of [@w] -> [E]?
I should, I guess, have explained that over much Kent, Sussex & Hampshire standard English /aw/ is pronounced [Ew]. I pronounced my surname as /brEwn/ well into my late teens. Indeed, it wasn't till I got to University that I made a conscious effort to acquire the standard /au/ - my girl-friend had to understand me ;) BTW that meant that in Sussex 'our' was (and still largely is) pronounce /E(r)/. Many Sussex speakers have now lost the rhotacism but it still survives in the more rural eastern part of the county. Ray. PS - I wasn't being serious about Greek fonts. ;)