New Jersey Dialects

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On Oct 20, 2004, at 3:12 PM, Bethany K. Dumas wrote:

>>> the /e/ versions are what you get if you treat the day names as N-N
>> compounds, with primary accent on the first element and secondary
>> accent on the second.
>>
>> but frequent and opaque compounds are always open for accent
>> reduction.
>>  unfortunately, word-final unaccented /e/ is not something english
>> does, so if you're going to have an unaccented syllable, you shift the
>> vowel up to /i/...
>>
>> Why is that <unfortunate>, arnold?

i meant merely to say that there's a conflict for speakers; you can't
have both an unaccented syllable and word-final /e/, so if you want the
unaccented syllable, you have to do something with the vowel.

arnold