Raising of unstressed vowels in Eng from schwa to /I/

[John Hewson]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
On Thu, 17 Jul 2003, Cecil Ward wrote:

(snippet)

> The phenomenon may be confined to the syllable that immediately
precedes the stress, is that correct?

Not true. Remember AA Milne's
        They're changing the guard at Buckingham Palice;
        Christopher Robin went down with Alice.

I've often heard Canada pronounced Canida by British speakers.
And there are all the plurals in [-iz], horses, boxes, matches, pages,
the 3rd sing verb forms in similar circumstances: smashes, catches,
dodges, passes, buzzes, and the past tense markers after /t,d/: waited,
boarded.

The first vowel in _disaster_ is reduced to schwa in American English, as
is the last vowel in _Latin_; is the [i] that is heard in British English
in these words a reduced vowel? The American pronunciation [latn] has a
syllabic [n] in the last syllable and no vowel. (The converse happens in
_pattern_, where BE has [patn], but in AE, where there is r-colouring, the
second vowel is clearly heard).

The question is further complicated by the fact that American schwa is
often barred [i].

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John Hewson, FRSC                               tel: (709)737-8131
Henrietta Harvey Professor Emeritus             fax: (709)737-4000
Memorial University of Newfoundland
St. John's NF, CANADA A1B 3X9
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