Re: General phonetics // was "Newbie"

On Tue, 13 Jan 2004, Mark J. Reed wrote:

> On Wed, Jan 14, 2004 at 09:47:42AM +1030, Morgan Palaeo Associates wrote:
> > 'Shortened' is definitely more appropriate than 'lengthened', I'd say,
> > for the following reason. 'Shorter' is probably better still, though.
> > Consider the length of '&' in various words. Here's a sample:
> >
> >   pad (short)
>
> Not in my 'lect.  "pad" and "bad"  are of the same length, differing
> only in the initial consonant (which differs in voicing, laxness/tenseness,
> and aspiration).
*Sigh*. He's talking about Australian English. This is why EPTs are not
recommended. (It should be pointed out that as far as I know, that pad is
[p&d] and bad is [b&:d] (and no, it's not the initial consonant, cf. [l&d]
or [p&:5] or [d&d]) means that here it's a phonemic contrast, and most lay
people I've spoken to are aware of the difference, whereas I'm always
intriged to hear of the difference of ee or oo before a voiced/voiceless
consonant. Not to mention that my Melburnian speech made [el] [&l] so
there's an occasional contrast when an earlier */&l/ was phonemicised as
/&:l/. Very occasional though, for some reason most of the */el/~*/&l/
contrasts were in the vicinity of either an open syllable (no lengthening
but still lowering i.e. salary~celery=/s&l@ri/) or unstressed syllable (no
lengthening but still lowering i.e. shell~shall=/S&l/.)

> >   bad (long)
> >   pat (short)
> >   bat (short)
>
> -Mark
>
--
Tristan

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