ah/ awe

[David Bowie]

From:    "Arnold M. Zwicky" <zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU>
> On Oct 3, 2006, at 10:17 AM, Tom Zurinskas wrote:

>> Thanks Arnold.  However, I wasn't refering to my own dialect.  I was
>> refering to "right" as spoken in m-w.com.

> ah.  the pronunciation there is diphthongal, but with a very short
> offglide, because of the shortening effect due to the following
> voiceless stop.  listen to "ride", "rhyme", and "rye" for easier-to-
> hear examples.

>> The verb is one phthoung not two
>> as I hear it there.

> i don't really understand your use of the non-standard technical term
> "phtho(u)ng".  but the offglide is certainly there in m-w's "right".
> it's just not very long -- i'd guess about as long as the offglides
> for /o/ (in "goat") and /e/ (in "gate"), but i'm not about to fire up
> my Praat software just to demonstrate a point that's quite clear to
> my trained ears (and, i think, to almost everybody else with some
> training in phonetics).

Well, Tom has said we should "put this to bed", and in the interest of
doing so, i *did* fire up Praat, after going through a bit of tweaking
my Firefox settings to be able to download m-w.com's recording of "right".

There's a clear diphthong, which you can see in the screenshot i've
uploaded to http://www.pmpkn.net/lx/right.gif --the formant tracks are
from Praat's default settings, nothing tweaked, and you can see the /r/
with its lowered third formant, the final /t/ with silence followed by
turbulence, and the intervening /ai/ with the first, second, and third
formants all moving (respectively decreasing, increasing a lot, and
increasing). In case Tom doesn't get the significance of this, the
changing first and second formants of a vowel are pretty clearly
indicative of changing tongue position in a case like this.

So, yes, let's put this one to bed--and now, Tom, maybe you can deal
with the question that started all this, about how you'd deal with such
diphthongs in your dream world of language, instead of ducking it by
claiming the existence of monophthongs in English where there are none.

<snip>

--
David Bowie                               University of Central Florida
     Jeanne's Two Laws of Chocolate: If there is no chocolate in the
     house, there is too little; some must be purchased. If there is
     chocolate in the house, there is too much; it must be consumed.

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org