Re: Phoneme winnowing continues

>
> > 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.  I myself first noticed it when I was 6:

The common cormorant or shag
lays its eggs in a paper bag

does not rhyme for me (the a of bag is long).

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).

Ian

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