postvocalic /l/

[Gordon, Matthew J.]

Because it's been several months since Tom shared this particular irrational fear, I'd like to offer some perspective for anyone who might have missed the responses to his earlier posts on this.

1. In most of North America, 'on' and 'off' are pronounced with the same phoneme. This includes those areas where the low back vowel merger is found (i.e. where 'cot' and 'caught' come to be homophones) but also the traditional South and Midland regions of the US. It's only in the traditional North that 'on' is pronounced with an unrounded vowel and 'off' with a rounded one, and guess which region Tom represents.

2. Even for those dialects that use the same phoneme in 'on' and 'off' there would normally be strong allophonic differences between the vowels involving nasalization (with 'on') and shortening (for 'off'). For non-linguists, this means that the vowels are not pronounced the same and therefore a distinction could be detected even if (for some reason) the final consonants in the words were inaudible.

3. /l/ vocalization and deletion is an extremely common phenomenon found to varying degrees in many (perhaps most or even all) varieties of English around the world. There is no such tendency, as far as I know, for similar deletion of either /n/ or /f/ at the end of words except maybe in consonant clusters.

4. "steward", really????


-Matt Gordon

________________________________________
From: American Dialect Society [ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf Of Tom Zurinskas [truespel at HOTMAIL.COM]
Sent: Thursday, March 04, 2010 7:19 PM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Re: postvocalic /l/

If an "awe-dropper" mispronounces the word "brawl" as ~braal (with "ah" instead of "awe" as the vowel) it's easy to hear "bra" (if the "l" is not said strongly).

My big worry is that "off" when said with the "awe-dropped" becomes ~aaf and sounds like "on" if the last phoneme is dropped, which, as we see, can happen.  In fact on an airplane I heard the steward say "Turn all electronic devices ah".  He clipped the last phoneme, which was "f", for "off" I suppose, not "n" for "on".  But the "ah" might make one suppose "on".  Not good in critical applications to confuse "off" and "on".


Tom Zurinskas, USA - CT20, TN3, NJ33, FL7+
see truespel.com phonetic spelling

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