Re: "walk" or "wuck" or "wahk" - was American-o
- From: Salvatore Volatile <me@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 31 Jan 2006 18:25:00 +0000 (UTC)
Evan Kirshenbaum wrote:
> This similarity is what makes it reasonable to say that I pronounce
> "wok" as /wOk/ while Richard pronounces it as /wAk/, even though our
> actual realizations of /O/ and /A/ likely differ substantially. If he
> were to hear me say the word in a sentence, he would almost certainly
> hear it as /wOk/, while I would likely hear his as /wAk/.
Probably, although I'd note that when I was in Chicago I misanalyzed the
vowel used in the first syllable of "Wabash" by Chicago speakers. It's
supposed to be /O/, but I heard it as "ah".
> Where this gets tricky is when two dialects don't make the same
> distinctions. Then you have to arbitrarily pick a single symbol to
> represent the phoneme in the dialect that doesn't make the
> distinction. One common way is to use the symbol for the phoneme that
> is *heard* by speakers of dialects that do make the distinction. This
> is why "CIC" dialects, which don't distinguish between /O/ and /A/
> tend to have their phoneme written as /A/. But it is arbitrary.
> It's not really sensible to say that one CIC speaker has /A/ while
> another has /O/.
TYERK. We have been waiting for someone to say this clearly for years.
> The really tricky situation is where, as in MIMIM ("Mary" is "merry"
> is "marry")
I think the canonical expansion is "Mary is marry is merry", but okay.
> dialects, the speaker has the phonemic distinction, but
> not in a particular context. As such a speaker, I can attest that I
> have /eI/, /E/, and /&/ in my phone inventory, but there's no
> distinction made (or heard from speakers who do make a distinction)
> before /r/. So which symbol do you use. There would seem to be two
> approaches: you can ask somebody who does hear the distinction to tell
> you which one they hear or you can ask the speaker which one they
> imagine themself to be producing. I tend to prefer the latter and say
> that all three words have /&r/ for me, but I realize that this may
> imply that other speakers of the very same dialect may come to
> different conclusions (and we would each hear the other using the
> phonemes we expect).
Sparky and others seem to like to use /E/ for the merged vowel. But those
of us AmE MINMINMs seem to hear most MIMIM speakers as using our "Mary"
vowel. I'm uncomfortable using /eI/ to represent my "Mary" vowel, but
that's a whole nother subject.
--
Salvatore Volatile
ref at freeshell dot org
.
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- "walk" or "wuck" or "wahk" - was American-o
- From: Jim Lawton
- Re: "walk" or "wuck" or "wahk" - was American-o
- From: Evan Kirshenbaum
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