They say "Ih-slip", I say "Aye-slip"

Laurence Horn laurence.horn at YALE.EDU
Tue Apr 10 18:31:03 UTC 2007


At 2:07 PM -0400 4/10/07, Joel S. Berson wrote:
>At 4/10/2007 10:37 AM, Laurence Horn wrote:
>>If there's any variation, I
>>would guess it might be in voicing the fricative, but never in laxing
>>the vowel.
>
>This is beyond my learning.  Can you dumb it down for me?  That is,
>what would these two sound like?
>
Standard version, as you observed:  ['ayslIp]
(or ['aysl at p], but I'll ignore the quality of the unstressed vowel;
cf. the Lexis/Lexus thread)

Possibly encountered (by me) variant:    ['ayZlIp]

Never-encountered (by me) variant: ['IslIp] (or ['IzlIp])

It's the last of these (in the first of the two versions) that you
heard in Boston.

LH

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