ah/ awe

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On Oct 3, 2006, at 10:17 AM, Tom Zurinskas wrote:

> Thanks Arnold.  However, I wasn't refering to my own dialect.  I was
> refering to "right" as spoken in m-w.com.

ah.  the pronunciation there is diphthongal, but with a very short
offglide, because of the shortening effect due to the following
voiceless stop.  listen to "ride", "rhyme", and "rye" for easier-to-
hear examples.

> The verb is one phthoung not two
> as I hear it there.

i don't really understand your use of the non-standard technical term
"phtho(u)ng".  but the offglide is certainly there in m-w's "right".
it's just not very long -- i'd guess about as long as the offglides
for /o/ (in "goat") and /e/ (in "gate"), but i'm not about to fire up
my Praat software just to demonstrate a point that's quite clear to
my trained ears (and, i think, to almost everybody else with some
training in phonetics).

a genuinely monophthongal pronunciation of "right" would give
something in between "rot" and "rat", and would be heard, out of
context, as one or the other of these.  (in context, there would be
clues as to the identity of the word, and this pronunciation for
"right" would lead you to identify the speaker as a monophthongizer,
probably a southerner.  meanwhile, /o/ and /e/ without their
offglides are possible, and would lead you to peg the speaker as from
the upper midwest.)

the terminology here is tricky.  many phoneticians distinguish
between "true diphthongs", which have two steady states within a
single syllable nucleus, and "offglided" (or "onglided") vowels, with
a short final (or initial) movement away from (or towards) a single
steady state.  the english phonemes /aj aw oj/ are true diphthongs, /
i e u o/ offglided vowels.

the complexity comes from the fact that the phonetic realizations of
phonemes in context can be quite various.  an unglided vowel like /E/
can have glided realizations (as /E/ does for many speakers before /
g/, as in "leg", but not before /k/, as in "lek").  a true diphthong
like /aj/ can have merely offglided realizations, in shortening
contexts.  and so on.

>   Good to hear you say that it is entirely possible to
> say long i as a one phthong.

and if you do so, you'll sound like a southerner.

perhaps the problem is in your understanding of what counts as a
vowel segment (my guess as to what "phtho(u)ng" means for you).  a
very elementary observation in phonetics/phonology is that a segment
can be phonetically complex, with parts that differ in their phonetic
properties: in the world of consonants, the textbook examples are
affricates, in the world of vowels, diphthongs.  no one is claiming
that an affricate like /tS/ (in "church", twice) is a sequence of two
consonants, or that a diphthong like /aw/ (in "out") is a sequence of
two vowels.

complex segments are (sometimes) *transcribed* as sequences of
symbols, mostly because insisting on unitary symbols increases the
size of the symbol inventory needed (and challenges conventional
keyboards).  even so, affricates are given unitary representations in
some transcription systems: /C/ (well, c-hacek) for the "church"
affricates.  we could perfectly well do the same for diphthongs,
pressing, say "#" into service for the vowel nucleus of "out".

>   I agree.  However I think that long i as a two
> phthong would be rare.

common as dirt.

>   I hear in Australia "roit".

yes, a diphthong, not too far from the one i have in "boy".  but this
is just the australian counterpart of  american/british /aj/, with an
initial centralized portion.  there's a question about the best way
to transcribe it phonemically, but the australian version isn't
relevant to the nature of the standard american vowel.

>   Perhaps UK has
> "rah-eat".

this invented transcription looks like you're talking about a two-
syllable version of the word, which i don't think *anybody* has,
except is emphatic hyperarticulated speech.

> But USA has "eye" as on phthong.

good grief!  *listen* to the way the word "eye" is pronounced!

> Perhaps you could point out some real saliant words with the two
> phthong.

my previous posting listed a number of words in which the diphthongal
character of this vowel is quite clear.

arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu)

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