[Lexicog] new nosey word, but really phonetics

[Richard Rhodes]

I'm going to stick my neck out again and say something controversial.
I believe that EVERY stressed vowel in American English is
diphthongized, or potentially diphthongized. We all know this about
mid and high tense vowels. But for me, all stressed lax vowels move
towards schwa unless they are in shortening contexts, quickly
pronounced. This includes vowels for which it is particularly hard to
hear, /a/, open o (in those dialects that continue that contrast),
caret, and syllabic r. For those of you who are native speakers,
notice that when you pronounce words like, wad, bawd, bud, and bird,
you can feel the body of tongue move upwards toward the end of the
vowel before the tip flips up. And just to show it's not part of the
transition to the d, pronounce law and you'll feel the same motion.
It's that ever so slight diphthong that distinguishes burr from brrr
for me.


Rich Rhodes


At 5:01 PM -0600 4/12/04, Koontz John E wrote:
>
>I am reminded of an incident in a class in which a brand new sonograph was
>demonstrated to us as we passed through a lab.  We did various
>extemporaneous tests.  A French student was asked to pronounce a word with
>a nasal vowel, which chanced to come between two stops.  Visible in the
>sonogram was a short but distinct n.  She was horrified and repeated it
>several times without being able to eliminate it.  Still, I feel sure it
>was a perfectly valid nasal vowel.  In short, phonetic realization is not
>a segmental analysis.  I feel certain that there are vowel-less syllables
>in various languages, though their sonograms might sometimes surprise us.
>Whether in all cases one might want to call the resulting syllables
>vowelless in a segmental analsys would depend on the language and the
>analysis.  In some cases yes, in others no.  (Mostly no, I would guess in
>English, though the lack of the vowel is probably real enough
>phonetically.)
>
>Conversely, there might be quite real phonetic vowels that would *not* be
>considered vowels for purposes of a segmental analysis.
>
>I'm pretty sure there's nothing of segmental significance between k and t
>in Russian kto.
>


--
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  Richard A. Rhodes
  Department of Linguistics
  University of California
  Berkeley, CA 94720-2650
  Voice (510) 643-7325
  FAX (510) 643-5688

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