ah/ awe

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On Oct 2, 2006, at 9:33 PM, Tom Zurinskas wrote:

> ...Note the words "rot" and "right" .  The word "right" does not
> start out as
> "rot" and then with a wee transition vowel in it before "t."  It
> goes right
> from the "r" to long i then to "t".  The tongue is in a different
> position
> for the "o" in "rot" than for the "i" in "right".  The tongue does not
> transition during "right".

you're describing a dialect of english here, but it's very much a
minority dialect.  for some southern speakers (and some others) the /
aj/ phoneme is monophtongized.  the result is (usually) phonetically
distinct from the /a/ phoneme (as in "rot"), in length and usually
quality as well.  (for a great many speakers, not just from the
south, the initial part of /aj/ is not phonetically identical to /a/,
but is somewhat fronted, in the direction of ash; this is the sound
that remains in monophthongization.)

to be sure that you do monophthongize /aj/, we'd need to hear you,
watch you produce words, record you, and analyze your speech
acoustically.

one problem here is that it can be difficult to listen for phonetic
detail in your own speech; perception tends to be skewed by a variety
of factors, and it takes real training to get at all  good at
listening to yourself.  everyone who's taught intro linguistics,
phonetics, or sociolinguistics has run up against these problems in a
number of students.  (illustrative exercise: describe the initial
*sound* -- not phoneme -- in "try", in phonetic detail.  hint: it is
*not* a voiceless alveolar stop.)

a great many american (and british) speakers have been studied, and
the large majority of them have diphthongal /aj/ (in the sense that
there are two different steady states in its articulation).
diphthongal /aj/ is standard, and that's why it's the pronunciation
given in dictionaries.  you might have a non-standard pronunciation
here.  but we're all a bit dubious, especially since you say you grew
up in connecticut, which is not usually reported as a
monophthongizing area.

another possibility is that you do have a monophthongal pronunciation
(or a pronunciation with only a brief offglide, like the ones in /o/
and /e/), but in only a few words.  "right" is both a high-frequency
word (such words are especially prone to reductions) and a word with
a voiceless stop following the vowel in question (vowels are shorter
before voiceless stops than they are before voiced stops, and very
much shorter there than they are before sonorants or in open
syllables).  so in addition to looking at "right", you should try
"night", "fight", "bite", "like", "ripe", etc. (high frequency,
voiceless stop), "kite", "bike", "trite", etc. (lower frequency,
voiceless stop), "wide", "pride", "tried" (voiced stop), "nine",
"crime", "file", etc. (sonorant), "buy", "guy", "sigh", "fry", etc.
(open syllable).

arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu)

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