Texas vs Bostonian vowels

[Jessie Emerson]

rudy troike wrote...

> While the usually very front Southern /ae/ can be perceived in Boston as
the diaphonemic equivalent of /ar/ [a], the latter is actually phonetically
closer to the "Confederate vowel" (Sledd), the monophthongized pronunciation
of /ay/.

And I believe the "Confederate vowel" is different from what I was
describing in North Alabama, where the dialect is not Coastal Southern
(monopthongized /ay/), but Highland Southern (at least those were the
generalized groupings I remember), where most everything is raised.

Jessie Emerson
(who is quite rusty at phonological descriptions)