LL-L: "Pronunciation" LOWLANDS-L, 06.SEP.2000 (05) [E]

[Lowlands-L]

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From: John M. Tait [jmtait at altavista.net]
Subject: LL-L: "Phonology" LOWLANDS-L, 015.SEP.2000 (01) [E]

Ron wrote:

In Scots itself there
is the case of an apparent shift from a long /u/ to a long /ü/, as in
_guid_ [gy:d] (?) and _buik_ [by:k] (?).

And Sandy wrote:

"guid" and "beuk" actually have _short_
>vowels both in actual pronunciation and as a result of the SVLR).
>
An afterthought: Ron's transcriptions - apart from the length - look rather
like a Central Scots pronunciation of the _English_ cognate forms _good_ and
_book_ ([y], or something close to it, being the regular pronunciation of the
/u/ phoneme, rather than the historical /2/ phoneme, in such dialects). You
wouldn't have heard them from some Scottish film where the actors were
speaking half Scots and half English, Ron? Or am I just flailing around in the
dark?

John M. Tait.

----------

From: R. F. Hahn [sassisch at yahoo.com]
Subject: Pronunciation

John,

I'm not a hundred percent sure what got me onto that track.  I guess it was a
combination of some Scottish English dialects I have heard (from real people
and/or actors) and the spelling _ui_ and _eu_ which for some reason evokes the
idea of "longness" to me (perhaps because they are digraphs and remind me of
Dutch and Low Saxon spelling of diphthongs and long vowels?).

Given the (to me) new information, I now doubt that there was this
fronting>unrounding process.  Theoretically, /u/ could have first gone to [M]
(i.e., [U] without rounding) and then be fronted to [I], but I doubt that.
For some reason (?) short /u/ in the said cases (all cases?) went directly to
short /i/, the closes available non-rounded phoneme in the inventory.  What
triggered this shift is what I wish I knew.

Regards,
Reinhard/Ron

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