Re: YASPT

Quoting Tristan McLeay <zsau@...>:

> On Tue, 9 Dec 2003, Andreas Johansson wrote:
>
> > > >My mother's West Gautic dialect has it too.
> > >
> > > You mean the distinction or the merger?
> >
> > The distinction.
> >
> > She and my brother once had a delicious argument whether _fem_ "five" and
> > _hem_ "home" rhyme, problem being that they failed to notice she's saying
> [fEm]
> > and [hem], he's [fEm] and [hEm].
>
> Hmm, perhaps I'm confused, but I thought you needed to have a long
> syllable if it's stressed, and that length came from either two codas
> (geminate consonant or cluster) or a long vowel. Am I missing something?
That was another instance of "loose transcription". At least when the words are
fully stressed, all those final [-m] are strictly speaking [-m:]. (Or so I
think; telling if final consonants are long or not is not trivial for me. Yet,
I'm regularly told the distinction is phonemic in my L1!)

                                                     Andreas