vowels...

[Alice Faber]

Aaron E. Drews wrote:
>on 2/5/00 6:00 PM, Beverly Flanigan wrote:
>
>> Actually, no, this isn't an example of the Southern Vowel Shift; rather,
>> it's one of many mergers going on in the Midland, the West (as David Bowie
>> said) and, to some extent, in the South.  Thus, hail and hell merge to hell
>> (vs. the Southern Shift diphthongizing of hell to hail), fill and feel
>> merge to fill, still and steel merge to still, pool and pull merge to pull,
>> etc.
>
>I'm curious.  Does anybody merge _bull_ and _bowl_, _pull_ and _pole_ (I
>forget if I've asked this before some years ago)?  I know I make such a
>merger, and I attributed it to the /l/).  But I seem to have a different
>merger than the rest of the West.... and I had this merger *before* I moved
>to Scotland (where they don't distinguish _look_ from _Luke_ regardless of a
>following /l/).
>
Marianna Di Paolo and I found some speakers who appeared to have this
pattern in our data on the feel/fill, hail/hell, and pool/pull
near-mergers in Utah. Some of the speakers that we did acoustic
analysis on had very close poll/pull or poll/hull. (Since this wasn't
the focus of our study, we don't have enough tokens with /o/ from
each speaker to be sure of what's going on.) Then there are speakers
who don't distinguish the vowels in pull and cull (I'm one of those);
this seems to be recorded sporadically in PEAS (under bulge, bulk,
and pulpit), but it's a very rare pattern. At one point, I informally
surveyed my colleagues (asking them to group words together in
various ways). There was only one other person in the lab with a
similar pattern, and he had a very different personal dialect history
than I do.

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Alice Faber                    new, improved email: faber at pop.haskins.yale.edu
Haskins Laboratories            old email, if you must: faber at haskins.yale.edu
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