ah/ awe

[Tom Zurinskas]

Thanks David,

Oh.  Like a knife in the heart  - Bowie knife  - get it :)
Let me respond below with one last dying gasp.

>From: David Bowie <db.list at PMPKN.NET>

>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".

Dave.  I have Praat as well.  Let me know offline (or on if you like) how to
  download sound files from w-m.com.  Not that I don't trust you, but I've
got several issues.  One is the first vowel in a very interesting word,
"English".  I would like to check before I pose any more questions here.
This is important to  me because I have in fact respelled the English
language in my own phonetic spelling and made some judgment calls.

>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.

You can answer these questions offline if you like.  Can you mark where the
"r" "ah" "ee" and "t" are on the graph?   Can you bring up a word lilke
"rot" to see the "ah" sound.  How about "treat" for the "ee" sound.   Do
they look like parts of the vowel in "right".  How about if you patch them
so you get "raheet".  Does it look like "right".  Can you play that to hear
what it sounds like.

Someone said the trailing segment of the vowel could be a y "off"glide as
the mouth transitions out of the vowel and into saying the "t" in "right".
Many vowels have this.  Is there a way to check.  Perhaps the test above
would suffice.

Another thought.  Suppose I were to speak words with long i on the middle,
such as "like,type,mine,time" and hold the long i for a whole second.  (This
to me is doable, but if it were a diphthong shouldn't be)  Then, then say
"raht" holding the "ah" and "treat" holding the "ee".  What would be the
comparison.  I say these words like m-w.com.

>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.

I lke the pronunciation of "right" just as it is.  The only thought I have
is that I hear it as one phthong not two.  In NJ they have a vowel thats a 3
phthonger (triphthong?).  My goal is to help kids learn to read.  It would
be great if English followed the alphabetic principle, that letters and
letter strings have a set phonetic pattern.  So we can do this by 1.
changing spelling to an English friendly phonetic spelling, which I've done
with truespel, or 2. try to change pronunciation of current spelling to be
more consistent with the letters of current spelling.  History shows that
unless you have a king or dictator do it 1. is impossible.  So perhaps 2
could be baby stepped into.

Again, many thanks for your efforts.

Tom Z


>--
>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

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