Re: English syllable structure

Quoting Tristan Alexander McLeay <anstouh@...>:

> On Sun, 9 Dec 2001, Thomas R. Wier wrote:
>
> > My old professor at UT, Robert King, once told me a story about
> > a trip of his to London a few years back.  He was visiting with
> > some woman there and they were discussing about a place to eat.
> > She said: "Oh! There's this lovely new [t@.dZ&.n@u] restaurant
> > around the corner!" (or to that effect, with that pronunciation).
> > He said he shuddered inwardly, politely nodded and accepted her
> > invitation.
>
> What's [t@dZ{n@u] supposed to mean?
<Tejano>. Most Texans will instinctively pronounce it
[te(i)hAno(u)]*, which is reasonably close to the Spanish.
When Anglos [in Texas this refers to anyone who is white
and not-Hispanic] use it, they're usually referring to the
style of food or music that Hispanics have contributed to
Texan culture.

*(I use parentheses because so many Texans speak Spanish
fluently -- around 30% or so -- that it's quite likely you'll
find people who use pure vowels for those words rather than
diphthongs even when speaking English.)

> And it occurs to me that Americans are the people who say
> /t@meito/ and /t{ko/ rather than /t@mA:t8u/ and /tA:k8u/
> (those latter two are Aussie pronunciations, and we're a
> mixed bag of American and British, so I could be completly
> wrong there...).
Depends on the part of the country.  I can't imagine a
Texan or anyone else from the Southwest of the country
pronouncing it like [t&kou] rather than [tAkou].  That
would be grounds for being laughed at.  However, I could
easily imagine a Chicagoan pronouncing the first vowel
with something very nearly like [&], because of the
vowel-shifts that are characteristic of that city. These
same people would, however, have that same vowel everywhere
that other Americans have /A/, in foreign loans or not.

Most Americans do say [t@meir"ou], though.  Because of
the weird phonotactic rules of my idiolect, I usually
say [tmeir"ou].

=====================================================================
Thomas Wier <trwier@...> <http://home.uchicago.edu/~trwier>
                     "...koruphàs hetéras hetére:isi prosápto:n /
Dept. of Linguistics  mú:tho:n mè: teléein atrapòn mían..."
University of Chicago "To join together diverse peaks of thought /
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