Re: question on vowel tensing, fronting, backing, ect.

Reilly wrote:
<<
i was wondering  if anyone knew of ways vowels are affected by the
consonants around them
like when, instead of saying king [kIN] I say [kiN] (thats tensing i
think, right?)
i cant really think of any other ones
 >>

Where are you from?  This seems to be a general tendency of
Southern Californian English, as is the [-in] pronunciations of
"-ing".

In addition to that, the vowels in "bang" and "ban" are phonetically
indistinguishable from the vowel in "bane".  It seems to be a
consequence of the nasal coda.  However, the vowel in "Ben"
was unaffected.

It's interesting to note that there *is* a distinction for some in
the [N] final words with the low vowels.  Marv Albert, for
example.  He pronounces words that end in "-ang" as [&N],
but pronounces the last name of NBA player Luol Deng as
[EN].  I pronounce his last name and "dang" identically.

If you're interested in this phenomenon specifically, you can
look at my master's thesis, which I put online somewhere.

For other languages, there's an interesting distinction in Arabic
between what I perceive as [&] (probably [a]) and [A].  If the
character alif follows a consonant, you get the following distribution:

After /r/, /l/ (most of the time), /?\/, /H/, /q/, /t_?\/, /d_?\/,
/D_?\/, and /s_?\/ you get [A].

After /t/, /k/, /b/, /d/, /s/, /S/, /z/, /Z/, /h/, /x/, /m/, /n/,
/D/, /T/, /j/, /w/, /l/ (sometimes), /G/, /?/, and /f/ you get [A].

There's a related phenomenon of /i/ and /u/ becoming [e] and
[o] respectively (or sometimes a kind of diphthong like [@i] and
[@u] after anything uvular and backward (except the glottal stop),
but /r/ and /l/ are unaffected.

-David
*******************************************************************
"A male love inevivi i'ala'i oku i ue pokulu'ume o heki a."
"No eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn."

-Jim Morrison

http://dedalvs.free.fr/

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