Re: New Try from a New Guy

On Sunday 15 December 2002 9:02 am, Joseph Fatula wrote:
> ----- 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.

Um...

/A/ is in father, and /a/ is in Cot.  I think cut is useually /V/, but I don't
know about you.

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