"Monday"

Tom Zurinskas truespel at HOTMAIL.COM
Mon Jul 30 09:20:29 UTC 2012


Where is the allophone in the room? For me "Rosa's roses" would be ~~Roezuz roeziz~~.  Two phonemes.  No allophone. In another forum someone says that for a certain word in Spanish the /b/ or /v/ sounds could be heard.  She calls them allophones.  But by definition an allophone is a range of vocalizations within one phoneme, not across two.  Shall we call it a merger like ah/awe?  How about calling them "swappers"? Speaking of ah/awe, an Australian preacher at church yesterday did a phonetic test from the podium and asked how we say "glass" to which the audience said ~glas and she said it's more distinguished to say ~glaas.   Then she asked us to say "awesome" which she said as ~ausum and the audience clearly said "ahsome" ~aasum.   So awe-dropping is clearly prevelant in FL.

Tom Zurinskas, Conn 20 yrs, Tenn 3, NJ 33, now Fl 9.
See how English spelling links to sounds at http://justpaste.it/ayk


 
 



 > Date: Sun, 29 Jul 2012 22:13:33 -0400
> From: Berson at ATT.NET
> Subject: Re: "Monday"
> To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
> 
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Joel S. Berson" <Berson at ATT.NET>
> Subject:      Re: "Monday"
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> At 7/29/2012 11:15 AM, Laurence Horn wrote:
> >On Jul 29, 2012, at 10:54 AM, W Brewer wrote:
> >
> > > Laurence Horn wrote: <<< I'd have used a barred-i if I knew the ascii for
> > > it, but for me, unstressed barred-i and unstressed schwa are
> > > basically indistinguishable.>>>
> > > WB: Barred-eye should be an allophone of schwa before [n].
> > Alveolar raising.
> > >
> >But in other environments they supposedly contrast.  In Gleason's
> >old _Intro to Descriptive Linguistics_ that I was weaned on in the
> >early 60s, there was a purported minimal pair, "Rosa's" (with schwa)
> >vs. "roses" (with barred-i).  They always sounded like homophones to
> >me, probably because they're both totally unstressed, although I
> >certainly contrast them in the Bolinger way:  "No, I said "ros-uhz",
> >not "rose-izz".  (Or George-uhz vs. Georg-izz, for "Georgia's" vs.
> >"George's", which did come up when I was hanging out with both G.
> >Lakoff and G. Green; if you cited a sentence from "Georg{e/ia}'s
> >paper", I'd have had to ask whether you meant Georgia or
> >George.)  For me, these are just spelling pronunciations.
> 
> If I knew what allophone was, I'd probably disagree.  :-)  Yes, no,
> they're two phonemes for me.  I distinguish "Rosa's"and "roses", and
> "Georgia's" and George's" -- and I swear the former was a minimal
> pair in a linguistics course I took centuries ago, and was called
> "Descriptive Linguistics", and probably used the same book that Larry
> cites, and nyah! nyah! was at Harvard,* I distinguish "minster" and
> "Munster".  Or are the vowels there both stressed, and everyone distinguishes?
> 
> * But then, I've been accused heretofore of being pretentious.
> 
> Joel
> 
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