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Re: YASPT

From:Andreas Johansson <andjo@...>
Date:Tuesday, December 9, 2003, 13:46
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