Re: Furrin phones in my own lect!

On 3/29/06, Joe <joe@...> wrote:
> Mark J. Reed wrote:
>
> >On 3/29/06, Benct Philip Jonsson <bpj@...> wrote:
> >>*really* hard.  Thus I don't observe the correct allophony
> >>when speaking English, but use [5] everywhere -- even saying
> >>['mI5j@n] -- or rather ['mI\5:j3\n] :-) -- for "million".
> >Not sure how that is "incorrect allophony".  I have [5] in "million",
> >too.  First syllable just like "milk" without the [k]...
> 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
I'm not sure how to accurately describe the difference, but
my 'lect has distinct allophones of /l/ in e.g. "lean" and "mall".
The latter is further back (near-palatal?) and longer, and the
former further forward (alveolar or dental) and shorter.
In Esperanto I use the short dental lateral phone in both
initial and final position, and my impression is that's more
standard  -- but some American Esperanto
speakers seem to use the long palatal or retracted-alveolar
/l/ in final position too (e.g., one Midwesterner I know
who also has a strong American accent w.r.t. diphthongized
final vowels, though his Esperanto is quite understandable).

One of the sketchy languages I may or may not come back
to is an engelang where the final phoneme of a root indicates a
broad semantic category.  Since one of the categories is
indicated by "liquids" (or laterals), I've tried several sets of
lateral approximants but haven't been entirely satisfied
with them re: distinctness.  I probably need a combination
of length and POA contrast; and maybe it would be
interesting to have the _dental_ lateral be long and the
_palatalized_ lateral be short... (the opposite of [my dialect
of] English)?

--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry