Re: Hear Me! Hear Me!

On Sun, 2002-06-23 at 17:16, Adrian Morgan wrote:
> Aleks koch wrote, quoting [Adrian Morgan]:
>
> > words "There" "World" "Our" "Morgan" are basically the same as you
'There' sounds as though it's having an abnormal pronunciation (it
could, of course, be a normal pronunciation for you, but the rest is
fairly Australian so maybe I'm just linking it to what I know). 'World'
sounded a bit strange, don't know what exactly it is, it could just have
been a bit less rounded than mine is or something.

> > did. Most of the other words are differently pronounced though, and
> > in truth the only thing similiar is that I pronounce an "r" in those
> > words in the same way you did.
>
> Do you consider the vowel-phrase in "our"/"devour" to be a triphthong?
I'd consider 'devour' to have a triphthong, but not 'our' (which is just
/{u/; consider 'our own', which is [%{u"w8un], not [%{u"r\8un] (hmm...
that looks like gibberish). ('Hour', however, has the the triphthong.)

> Seems to me that it is:
>
> Its first vowel is the same [&] as in _south_ [s&uT] [which,
> interestingly, is wider (closer to [a]) than the [&] in _at_ [&t] or
> _aye_ [&i], which is relatively closed (closer to [E]).
Probably not all that interesting, actually. The [{u] vowel derives from
an earlier [au], whereas the [{i] comes from [ei], so they're just
reflecting their heritage.

(I can't hear a difference, though.)

> I'm not sure which of these two variants is considered "pure" [&],
My guess is it's [{u]'s vowel that is: I understand the Australia [{] is
higher than the American, which is 'pure'. I'm pretty sure it's higher
than the Finnish, if that helps.

(Tangentially, I've found me sometimes neutralising /I/ to [@] and
raising /{/ to [E] when I shouldn't be, similar (but not identical) to
what Kiwis* do. Nevertheless, /E/ doesn't seem to want to budge, and
when it does, it heads south, merging with /{/ (cf. the salary/celery
merger).)

*Apparently, 'Aussie' was first found in print in Kiwiland. Conveniently
enough, what caused 'Kiwi' to refer to NZers was a Melburnian company.

> or how they are distinguished in narrow transcription,
With a raised or lowered diacritic, or if you could afford it, with [a]
for the lower of the two.

> Its intermediate vowel isn't [u] because it doesn't involve moving
> the lips. It seems to involve a tightening in the back of the mouth.
> This intermediate vowel may be lost entirely in casual speech.
Different to me: the middle vowel in the /{u@/ triphthong *is* a [u] (or
[U] or [w] or something). Although it's normally included, it sometimes
disappears, with compensatory lengthening on the previous vowel (i.e.
[{;]). When it disappears, the [@] becomes more [{]-like. (The /u/ is
very likely to die when the /@/ is pronounced as [r]; when it doesn't,
the /u/ becomes an [y] for whatever reason; this occurs to any [u] (or
whatever vowel I actually use there; I have suspicions it isn't
[u]-proper) before an [r].)

Tristan.