Re: Phoneme winnowing continues

Ian Spackman wrote:

>>
>> > OK, just to confuse the issue, I have phonemic vowel length. :)
>> >
>> > Dam the river!  /d&m/
>> > Damn the river!  /d&:m/
>>
>> Those are both [d&m] for me.
>
>
> I don't know how widespread it is.  My immediate family seems to share
> it,
> although we disagree as to which words have long and short vowels in some
> cases.

In Australian English, there is contrastive length. /&/ and /&:/ have
very low functional load (the only minimal pair I can think of is /k&n/
vs /k&:n/), as do /O/ vs /O:/ (which have no minimal pairs, nor are
there any miminal pairs between /O:/ and /o:/, but I can't seem to
analyse them as one phoneme and if you said [go:n], people would
interpret that as 'gorn').

At least in Melbourne, everyone has a long vowel in the same words (e.g.
bag, sag, sad, ban, lamb) and a short vowel in the same words (e.g. dad,
had, can, bat). Words like 'dowry' are often pronounced [d&:ri].

/O:/ exists in one word alone: /gO:n/ (gone). It is not productive
except in immitating American speech (where it comes in handy as it's
almost identical to the American pronunciation of 'aw'), but because of
the irregularity of the spelling, there is no spelling for it.

> Anyway I think the means for me that it makes a neater analysis to say
> that
> English has contrastive length but not contrastive tenseness (though I
> haven't checked this carefully).
Australian English appears to have short vowels (e.g. /I/ (bid), /e/
(bet), /a/ (bud)), long vowels (e.g. /I:/ (beard),[1] /e:/ (bared), /a:/
(bard)) and diphthongs/tense vowels (e.g. /ij/ (beed), /&i/ (bayed),
/baid (bide)). In the rounded vowels (back vowels+/8:/ in bird),
/O/:/O:/ is the only long:short pair.

[I sometimes say [noD@n] for 'northern', but I'm almost certain that's
abnormal.]

[1]: This may be/is diphthongal in some contexts (stressed syllables
without a following consonant).

--
Tristan                  <kesuari@...>

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