My old buddy the archiphoneme

[Herbert Stahlke]

Naah.  I've got five diphthongs to your three.

Herb
>
> Nonsense; you've conflated the vowels of "hoarse" and "horse" and
> haven't distinguished /w/ from /hw/ for decades or more. Moral
> superiority in phoneme-counting and/or partial neutralization is only
> a figment of the self-important Michigan esteem for its own deficient
> dialect.
>
> dInIs
>
>
> >----- Original Message -----
> >From: "Dennis R. Preston"
> >
> >>  Definitely not an archiphoneme (though it warms my heart to see the
> >>  word early on Saturday morning). Not all neutralization is
> >>  archiphonemic. In this case the merger of /O/ and /a/ (as in most
> >>  western US dialects, Eastern New England and a growing band across
> >>  the Midland) does not result in an archiphoneme; it simply results in
> >>  phoneme loss. I have one more phoneme than such speakers (and clearly
> >>  a great deal of moral superiority by possessing it).
> >
> >One more phoneme!  What moral superiority!  I guess since my SE Mich
dialect
> >has phonemicized Canadian Raising before /d/, /nd/, and in open
syllables,
> >and I don't have the /O/  /a/ merger, your moral superiority is trumped.
> >Don't mess with native Michiganders.
> >
> >Herb
>
> --
> Dennis R. Preston
> Professor of Linguistics
> Department of Linguistics and Languages
> 740 Wells Hall A
> Michigan State University
> East Lansing, MI 48824-1027 USA
> Office - (517) 353-0740
> Fax - (517) 432-2736