"Monday"

[W Brewer]

LH: <<< WB characterized the raising of [@] to barred-i in "Leominster" as
allophonic>>>.

WB: No he di'int. WB don't even know what Leominster is. It was Joel the
Pretentious who said something about Herman Munster, or something. WB
speaks only for his own personal idiolect, which is his and belongs to him,
and is not incorrect because prescriptivism is a sin. For WB, unstressed
/schwa/ in normal, unreflective speech tends to be raised to [barred-eye]
before alveolars at the ends of words at least. This is a natural
assimilatory process. Exceptions seem to be when a contrast is called for,
as in Rose's vs. (emphatically schwa'ed) Rosa's. Maybe I would say
_Cuba's_Castro_ with the <a> kept lower than barred-eye, but not really
schwa. I think LH said something about spelling pronunciation as an
influence. I would say, in old fashioned Latinate terminology, that the
possessive ending is being influenced by the casus rectus, which is
analogical leveling of the schwa.**

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