[SPAM:####] Re: ah/ awe

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On Oct 4, 2006, at 6:59 AM, David Bowie wrote:

> Well, Tom has said we should "put this to bed", and in the interest of
> doing so, i *did* fire up Praat, after going through a bit of tweaking
> my Firefox settings to be able to download m-w.com's recording of
> "right".

thank you, david.

> There's a clear diphthong, which you can see in the screenshot i've
> uploaded to http://www.pmpkn.net/lx/right.gif --the formant tracks are
> from Praat's default settings, nothing tweaked, and you can see
> the /r/
> with its lowered third formant, the final /t/ with silence followed by
> turbulence, and the intervening /ai/ with the first, second, and third
> formants all moving (respectively decreasing, increasing a lot, and
> increasing). In case Tom doesn't get the significance of this, the
> changing first and second formants of a vowel are pretty clearly
> indicative of changing tongue position in a case like this.

and thank you for making the screenshot available for our inspection.

arnold

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