Bad Taste Breakthrough! PLUS New Phoneme! (UNCLASSIFIED)

[David Bowie]

From:    Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at GMAIL.COM>

<snip>

> A vocal imitation of an electronic "beep" (more like "eeeee"
> actually, but
> audibly distinct in pitch from / I / or even / I:: /)  contains just
> one.


The interesting thing, to my mind, is that pitch thing. It'd be a
contrastive suprasegmental feature, tone, maybe?—and English isn't
usually analyzed as a tonal language, but it would start having to be.

Not sure whether i'm serious about that or not. Maybe i am.

<pause />

Perhaps this is how Chinese tones got started.

And i know i'm not serious about that, but i think a talented writer
could probably do a decent speculative history story with that as the
jumping-off point.

David Bowie

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