Phonetic alphabets

[Jonathan Lighter]

Not sure I understand the question. Scots "I" /a/  often has a slight /i/ of-glide (and the more it has the closer it gets to general /ai/), but perhaps just as often there is no off-glide, at which point it is virtually the same as Southern U.S. /a/ "I" for speakers who have no /i/ off-glide either, though lots do.

Scots / i : /  "eye," spelled by Burns and others as "ee" or "e'e", has no off-glide that I can hear, unless it is a virtually unnoticeable relaxation to / I /.

JL

Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU> wrote:
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Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Laurence Horn
Subject: Re: Phonetic alphabets
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At 2:19 PM -0800 12/2/04, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>In Scots "I" is traditionally /ai/ or /a/ and "eye" is /i:/.
>
>JL

Is "eye" monophthongized the way "I" is in various southern U.S.
dialects? (Ah don't think so.)

Larry

>
>Barbara Need wrote:
>---------------------- Information from the mail header
>-----------------------
>Sender: American Dialect Society
>Poster: Barbara Need
>Subject: Phonetic alphabets
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>
>I just got off the phone with someone offering me a free subscription
>to an IT trade magazine, and she had to spell something for me. What
>I HEARD her say was, "e as in I". Of course, what she meant was "e as
>in eye". In what variety/varieties of English are these not
>homophones?
>
>Barbara
>UChicago--Linguistics
>
>
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