English in USA

[Jonathan Lighter]

I too hear / IN... /.  However, made paranoid by repeated listening, I may hear the slightest [ i ] onset of the initial [ I ]. My own pronunciation seems to me to lack this.

  The *phoneme* I hear, however, is unmistakably / I /.

  If Tom has some form of "barred-i" in the initial syllable - something tending toward
   / E / - he may hear the tiny [ i ]-glide more prominently.

  But in terms of phonemes, MW says / I / in both exx.

  JL




  Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU> wrote:
  ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Laurence Horn
Subject: Re: English in USA
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

At 9:05 PM -0500 11/14/06, Alice Faber wrote:
>Laurence Horn wrote:
>>At 6:32 PM -0500 11/14/06, Joel S. Berson wrote:
>>>At 11/14/2006 02:29 PM, Paul Johnston wrote:
>>>>It's not W CT either--or, I'd be very surprised if it was.
>>>
>>>It's not "Eenglish" in NYC, at least not when I was growing up
>>>there. So I too would be surprised if it's W CT, that being NY
>>>Yankee country. :-)
>>>
>>It's not "Eenglish" in South Central CT either, or on www.m-w.com,
>>where the speaker quite clearly renders [INlIS], rhyming with, well,
>>Singlish. Of course, I tested this on a computer in South Central
>>CT; maybe it's different on computers in W CT...
>>
>
>Well, my parents still have dialup, so I doubt I'll be able to try it
>out when I'm at their house for Thanksgiving. Oh, well.

Anyone else hear the www.m-w.com pronunciation as "Eenglish"? Of
course maybe all our ears (and our spectrographs) have been
corrupted...

LH

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