vowels...

[David Bowie]

From:    Alice Faber <afaber at MAIL.WESLEYAN.EDU>
: David Bowie wrote:

: >One thing that i've seen sporadically there but haven't looked
: >at properly is an occasionally merger of _dull_ and _pull_.

: I'd love to know more about this one, having it in my own speech.
: Of course, /U/ and /^/ are pretty close for me also before other
: vowels, but not merged. Way back when I first learned IPA, I had
: a hard time learning to transcribe those vowels correctly. When
: I started working with Marianna on vowels before /l/, I had to
: memorize the etymological vowel classes for <-ull> words. This
: was a hard learned lesson, after miscoding a data set! Before
: that, I'd been absolutely unaware of the merger.

Nearly *exactly* the same experience happened to me to get me to learn that
there's an /^/-/U/ distinction (except replace Marianna Di Paolo with
William Labov). Glad to know there's other people in the world who have made
some of the same mistakes as me. :-)

: >In all of these cases, where there's a merger in production, the
: >target is [U]. The four vowels *only* merge before /l/; the
: >distinctions are consistently and vigorously maintained
: >otherwise.

: I think that's right, bearing in mind that for some of our Utah
: speakers, /U/ in other contexts is fairly front.

There's a difference--in Southern Maryland (or at least in Waldorf), /U/
remains pretty backed all 'round.

David Bowie                                       Department of English
Assistant Professor                            Brigham Young University
db.list at pmpkn.net              http://humanities.byu.edu/faculty/bowied
   The opinions stated here are not necessarily those of my employer