Man & male

[LanDi Liu]

On Tue, Apr 8, 2008 at 12:26 AM, Paul Johnston <paul.johnston at wmich.edu>
wrote:

> Hold it, with man and male.  It is true there are dialects out there
> with [eI] for both--Muddy Waters's AAVE, for instance  (Listen to
> either "I'm a Man" or "Hoochie Coochie Man", both [meI~(n)]).  But
> most dialects with "tensed ash" have an INgliding diphthong starting
> with something in the [e~I~E] range, or maybe, in the South, a
> triphthong made up of an upgliding diphthong plus schwa; male, on the
> other hand, has an UPgliding diphthong.  I can conceive of some
> Southern dialects having [aeI@] for both, with the /l/ of male
> generating a schwa before it (though I think of this as a Northern
> feature)/  There are also dialects with [E] in male (the gel=jail
> merger of the Midlands produces this).  Michael, do you really merge
> the two under one of these realizations?
>
> That wasn't Michael that said it, it was me (Randy).  When I say /ei/ +
/l/, it comes out [e at l] if it is in the same syllable.  If it is not in the
same syllable, then it comes out [ei.l], as in "playland".  I believe this
to be a feature of midwestern English.  With the ash-tensing in "man", I
pronounce it [me at n].  Both are the same centering diphthong.

Incidentally, if I say "eel" slowly, and completing the /l/ by touching the
tongue tip to the alveolus, I get a centering diphthong [i@] before the /l/.


> The way I was trained, a diphthong acts like a unit phonemically, but
> has a V1 and a V2 (first and second element) that are not identical.
> If V1=V2, you have a long vowel.  And, yes, I realize that the
> description in  this way is something of an idealization anyway,
> since in real speech, segments shade into each other.   A diphthong
> ending in schwa  (or anything non-high and not likely to be analyzed
> as a glide) is just as much of a diphthong as any other one.


I agree, although there are those who think that centering diphthongs are
not "true" diphthongs.


> This is a side point.  If the vowel in man=male for you, this is
> probably another case of phonemic neutralization, which different
> schools of phonologists would treat differently.  Generative
> phonologists might well analyze it as you do.  Others might posit
> archiphonemes, which is something like Tom Zurinskas seems to do,
> probably without realizing it.  Others might posit lexical transfer,
> depending on what the surface realization is.  I doubt it is a case
> of total merger, since to my knowledge, no English dialects merge the
> WHOLE CAT class with the whole MATE/BAIT class.  But it's a debatable
> point in phonology anyway.


The generative phonology point of view sounds close to how I'm looking at
it.  I have no idea what you mean by lexical transfer in this case.  It's
definitely not a whole merger of one phoneme class into another.

Randy

>
>
>
> On Apr 5, 2008, at 11:04 PM, LanDi Liu wrote:
>
> > ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> > -----------------------
> > Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> > Poster:       LanDi Liu <strangeguitars at GMAIL.COM>
> > Subject:      Re: yahoo
> > ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> > ---------
> >
> > On Sun, Apr 6, 2008 at 6:29 AM, Michael Covarrubias
> > <mcovarru at purdue.edu>
> > wrote:
> >
> >>
> >> Scot LaFaive wrote:
> >>> Essentially, phonemes are
> >>> in your head and allophones are the actual production of phonemes in
> >>> specific environments. I don't know of any other definitions for
> >>> phoneme and allophone that phonologists use, so I'm not sure what
> >>> you
> >>> mean by "search engines give several definitions." I think I'll go
> >>> with what phonologists mean by phoneme and allophone instead of
> >>> Google
> >>> and Yahoo.
> >>>
> >>> Scot
> >>>
> >>
> >> Something "in your head" isn't much of a definition. Phonologists
> >> probably have more definitions of phoneme than Google and Yahoo
> >> combined.
> >>
> >> michael
> >>
> >> Why not?  It's just a less technical way to say that phonemes are
> > perceptual.  Allophones are the way that phonemes are physically
> > expressed.
> > A tapped /t/, an aspirated /t/, and an unaspirated /t/ are all the
> > same
> > phoneme, /t/, but are different allophones.  /t/, however, is a
> > very clean
> > example.  When you get into vowels, especially diphthongs, it gets
> > tricky,
> > and murky.  For example, some of you may think Mary, marry, and
> > merry have
> > different phonemes, but they're all the same for people like me who
> > have
> > merged them.
> >
> > And if you're American, you probably say "man" and "male" with the
> > same
> > vowel sound -- "man" with a tensed ash, and "male" the same way,
> > but you
> > also probably consider "man" to have a short a sound, and "male" to
> > have a
> > long a sound.  If you say them that way (and I do), you are using
> > the same
> > sound in two different phonemes.
> >
> > When defining an accent one must make some arbitrary decisions
> > about what
> > constitutes a phoneme in that accent, and what constitute
> > allophones in each
> > phoneme.  Usually we try to apply an objective rule to this
> > process, like
> > the idea that changing phonemes affects meaning, but changing
> > allophones
> > doesn't, but this is not always cut and dry.
> >
> > --
> > Randy Alexander
> > Jilin City, China
> >
> > ------------------------------------------------------------
> > The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>



--
Randy Alexander
Jilin City, China

--
Randy Alexander
Jilin City, China

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