Re: Improved (Short) Ygyde

On Wed, 2003-04-16 at 18:28, Peter Bleackley wrote:
> Staving Christophe Grandsire:
> >En réponse �  Tristan :
> >
> >>  (Fortunately, I doubt anyone would
> >>mix up 'reed' and 'rid', being two incredibly distinct words in use and
> >>meaning.)
> >
> >Indeed :) . In this case, hearing them identically doesn't hinder
> >communication. In fact, in my experience, confusing [i] and [I] never
> >provokes misunderstandings when listening to English.
>
> I'm not sure that this tense/lax distinction is phonemic in English - to be
> honest, I don't quite understand what the distinction is, which makes me
> suspect that it isn't an important one in my native language. However,
> there's definitely a long/short contrast between reed [ri:d] and rid [rid],
> which I think is a more important contrast in English. However, I'm
> beginning to suspect that there's a tendency for length contrasts in
> English to correlate with other contrasts, cf the contrast between [&] and
> [a:].
This, like so much else in English, varies based on dialect. For
example, in my dialect, if you have a sound that's exactly like [I] in
'rid' except long, it'll be interpreted as 'reared', so the difference
is obviously not just the length (in this case, it's that the vowel in
'reed' is a diphthong{1} (like /&i/ and /oi/; it is categorised as
such). [6:] (part) contrasts with [6] (put) for me, not [&] (pat), which
has a longform [&:] found in bad [b&:d], but not dad [d&d].

(If there is a category of tense vowels in my dialect, it'd probably
have /Ii/, /&i/, /ii/, /&u/, /8u/, /oi/ and /0u/{2} in it, which are all
the diphthongs and none else, so it might as well be called the
diphthongs. The diphthongs have semivowels as linkers (naive=[n6ijIiv]).
The long vowels and schwa are the ones that get a linking [r] before a
vowel; [&:] never exists in a position where it could get one, though
/&ur/ is pronounced [&:r] (e.g. dowry [d&:r\i]), and I sort of hear in a
very non-scientific and dodgy way a non-existent 'r', which probably
stems from the habit of using an 'r' to represent a long vowel, in a
word like *[d&:d]. This is why I seperate them thus.)

{1}: indeed, should I say [reid], it'd be a broad pronunciation of
'reed', not a formal pronunciation of 'raid', which can only be [r&id].
(It's always interpreted properly in other dialects because they're,
well, other dialects.)

{2}: [0]=close central rounded vowel, u-bar.

Tristan.