Re: New Try from a New Guy

----- Original Message -----
From: "Josh Roth" <Fuscian@...>
To: <CONLANG@...>
Sent: Saturday, December 14, 2002 8:51 PM
Subject: Re: New Try from a New Guy


(and various people said a lot of stuff)

> That’s just what I was going to say, except that the second element seems
> higher to me in each, so they'd be something like [Ai] and [{u]. I think
some
> Southern English uses [a] in the first diphthong, and some also drop the
[i],
> so you can have a distinction like 'cot' [kAt] and 'kite' [kat]. And here
in
> New York at least, /Ai/ has an allophone [Vi] that occurs before unvoiced
> consonants. Further up north, like in Canada (and Minnesota maybe, and
other
> places maybe), /{u/ seems to have an allophone [Vu] or [@u] before
unvoiced
> consonants.
Um... now I think I'm even worse off.  Let me explain some of the vowels
that are phonemic in the way I speak English.  I don't know what dialect
exactly it represents, but here they are:

/a/ as in father
/A/ as in cot
/O/ as in caught
/@/ as in cut

These vowels don't seem to have any diphthongization at all.  Does this make
sense?  For background, I'm from New York, not the city, very close to
Massachusetts, but lots of influence from parents, family, etc. from
Philadelphia, and I now live in California.

Joe Fatula

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