Bad Taste Breakthrough! PLUS New Phoneme! (UNCLASSIFIED)

[Mark Mandel]

I wouldn't call this "eeeeeeeeeeee" or the buzzer noise *phonemes of
English*, any more than the click of "tsk, tsk" is a phoneme. It's a
non-phonemic speech sound used by itself, never as part of a word containing
other phonemes -- except, maybe, as extensions of the same element, as in
"BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZT" for another version of the buzzer noise.

Nor would I classify as a phoneme the unrounded lax back vowel (or possibly
other articulations) sometimes transcribed as in:

Q: How are you feeling today?
A: Still pretty euuuuhhhhhhhh.

Like the in-phrase use of "eeeeeeeee" that Jonathan reports, this is
approaching word status syntactically, but phonologically I don't consider
it part of English lexical phonology. So we have a grey area. So what else
is new?

m a m

On Fri, Jul 23, 2010 at 8:13 AM, Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com>wrote:

> Eric, the buzzer comes close but it's still merely interjectional. CBS's
> "eeeeeeeee" is actually used in a phrase.
>
> JL
>
>

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