Raising of unstressed vowels

[Roger Lass]

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I'd like to add a few more points and some queries to the discussion.

1. What exactly is meant by 'schwa', and where does the notion come from
that the vowel was 'once' lower and has been raised? The neutralisation of
unstressed Vs that began to occur in late OE can be interpreted as merger in
[e], and the evidence for 'schwa' in the usual sense (a middish central
vowel that nobody wants to transcribe too closely) for any period before the
17th century is at least ambiguous. The first descriptions of central vowels
in the voluminous phonetic literature of the 16th-17th century comes after
1650, and only in stressed syllables. See my discussion in Cambridge History
of the English Language, III.

2. I think some of us raised in different traditions may be talking past
each other. As an American raised in the SOAS tradition of transcription,
'barred-i' means not whatever Smith & Trager thought it might be, but a high
central unrounded vowel, and that we certainly do not get in these
environments. The IPA transcription I think is meant (would someobdy
clarify?) is a further centralised version of small-cap I (which is itself a
centralised [e]).

3. The 'rural' pronunciations of words like 'China' etc. with a final vowel
other than 'schwa' normally do not have small cap I (that would sound very
North English), but in fact [i] or [Ii] - at least they did in S Indiana in
the 1970s, where I was exposed to them. If sung versions are evidence, this
vowel is [i] in some Virginia lects of the earlier parts of this century, as
witnessed by 'Virginia' and similar forms in the recordings of the Carter
Family.

Roger Lass