Query: women > wimming

[Peter A. McGraw]

To me, an [I] in the second syllable sounds decidedly Eastern.  Or like my
wife indicating the sometime feminist spelling "wimmin" for ironic effect.
My own pronunciation feels like a barred i or possibly a schwa.  Certainly
not a front vowel.

Peter Mc.

--On Friday, January 21, 2005 7:29 PM -0500 Laurence Horn
<laurence.horn at YALE.EDU> wrote:

>> --On Friday, January 21, 2005 5:18 PM -0500 Wilson Gray
>> <wilson.gray at RCN.COM> wrote:
>>
>>> FWIW, my
>>> mother is unique in my experience in pronouncing "women" as [wI m at n].
>>
>> ???  Am I being dense?  Aside from "wimming," I can't think of any other
>> way it could be pronounced.  Or do you mean she divides the syllables
>> before the [m] instead of after?  Or inserts a pause?  Or have I been
>> miss-pronouncing women all these years?
>>
> As Wilson says, the standard version would have an unstressed [I] in
> the second syllable rather than [@], but I don't think I'm alone in
> having trouble detecting quality differences in unstressed English
> vowels, as in the old "roses"/"Rosa's" minimal pair, or "hand in
> glove"/"hand an' glove".  (I mentioned a number of these in my
> "spitten image" paper from last year's AS.  Besides [I] and [@], it's
> claimed that some speakers have a vowel closer to barred-i, which I
> won't try to asciify.)
>
> larry



*****************************************************************
Peter A. McGraw       Linfield College        McMinnville, Oregon
******************* pmcgraw at linfield.edu ************************