Re: Furrin phones in my own lect!

[Delurking:]

Henrik said:
> No, I just wanted to say it's confusing to have two phonemes which we
> Germans would treat as two allophones of the same phoneme.
I assume you mean not that [v] and [w] are allophones of /v/ in
German, but that the foreign phone [w] gets mapped onto /v/ rather
than, say, /u/.

Joe wrote:
> Indeed.  English (and Australians and New Zealanders, I think) people
> use [l] and [5], Welsh and Irish people use only [l], Scots and North
> Americans use only [5].  So it really depends on what dialect you're
> attempting to imitate.
One cannot generalize about America in this way so easily.
For many, many Americans /l/ has two realizations: [l]
in onsets, and [5] in codas. And there are indeed other
Americans who have just [5], and I've heard tell that
in the Midwest, in parts of Wisconsin and Minnesota settled
by Scandinavians and Germans, there are also dialects of
English that have just [l].  (This last probably correlates
with the pronunciation of /o/ as [o] rather than [ow] in
the same communities.)

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Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
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