Talk:Phonological history of English close front vowels

message: === Hundred, pretended, cases ===
Is this what's happening to my "hundred", "pretended", "cases", etc.?  Jimp 4Oct05
:Hard to say without knowing more about you and your accent. Where are you from? --Angr/ 07:18, 4 October 2005 (UTC)
replies: text:  Could be, but this is quite complicated.  Accents which have two weak vowels don't all have the same distribution of them.  I don't rhyme abbot /ˈabət/ and rabbit /ˈrabɪt/, so I wouldn't say I have this merger.  However, I do have /ə/ in the last syllables of all the words you mention (although I do have a weak /ɪ/ in the first syllable of pretended /prɪˈtɛndəd/).  I'm from northern England; RP is different, and has /ɪ/ in those plural and past participle endings, though not in hundred, according to the OED.--JHJ 16:27, 4 October 2005 (UTC)

text: They mean there are very few that always distinguish the two sounds in every or almost every case. The ones with variably distinction will distinguish it in some words or in some cases, but not for every case and word. LokiClock (talk) 21:20, 23 August 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Moved from [[Talk:Weak vowel merger]]

message: Is this what's happening to my "hundred", "pretended", "cases", etc.?  Jimp 4Oct05
:Hard to say without knowing more about you and your accent. Where are you from? --Angr/ 07:18, 4 October 2005 (UTC)
replies: text:  Could be, but this is quite complicated.  Accents which have two weak vowels don't all have the same distribution of them.  I don't rhyme abbot /ˈabət/ and rabbit /ˈrabɪt/, so I wouldn't say I have this merger.  However, I do have /ə/ in the last syllables of all the words you mention (although I do have a weak /ɪ/ in the first syllable of pretended /prɪˈtɛndəd/).  I'm from northern England; RP is different, and has /ɪ/ in those plural and past participle endings, though not in hundred, according to the OED.--JHJ 16:27, 4 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Hundred, pretended, cases 

message: I don't know what the article means by "While there are some dialects that have a variable distinction, there are very few dialects that maintain a complete distinction."--JHJ 16:27, 4 October 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: They mean there are very few that always distinguish the two sounds in every or almost every case. The ones with variably distinction will distinguish it in some words or in some cases, but not for every case and word. LokiClock (talk) 21:20, 23 August 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Article content 

message: What is the trigger condition for the Lennon-Lenin merger? Linguofreak 23:37, 18 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm not sure what you're asking. In dialects with the weak vowel merger (which is what it's really called, "Lennon-Lenin" is just an example of it), unstressed  and  are merged to . The "classic" example is roses vs. Rosa's: in accents without the merger, the two words are different,  vs. , while in accents with the merger, the two words are homophonous as . Mergers aren't usually described as having "triggers" the way phonological rules are. Angr/talk 23:43, 18 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes, it's really called the weak vowel merger so why did we end up with that title?  Why? Because of User:DecGon a suspected sockpuppet.  I've reverted him. Jimp 16:04, 7 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: No, in my dialect "roses" as "Rosa's" are seperate ("roses" with /I/ "Rosa's" with /@/), but Lennon and Lenin are the same (both with /I/). So maybe we're actually talking two different phenomena here... Mine is a conditional phenomenon that I can't find the condition for. Random schwa's become /I/ with no (apparent) rhyme or reason, but some stubbornly remain schwa's (as in "Rosa's"), and every once in a while /I/ becomes schwa (as in the third i in "invincible", although the i's that become schwa's usually can be pronounced as either without sounding wierd). (BTW, for geographic reference, I speak American English of the Colorado variety.) Linguofreak 05:51, 15 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Trigger for Lennon-Lenin 

message: I spoke with some people from Arkansas and they seemed to change /ɛ/ to a diphthong /ɛɪ/.  For instance, he said 'spent' as /spɛɪnt/.  Is there any source that has noted this?Cameron Nedland 20:12, 6 May 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Pin-Pen merger and Arkansas 

message: I and most people I speak with distinguish pen and pin, and I am a native Texan. The sentence saying that it has merged through all of Texas is unsourced and invalid, so I have changed it. LokiClock (talk) 21:24, 23 August 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Pin-Pen merger and Texas 

message: The kit-bit split is a split of EME /ɪ/ found in South African English [...]
What is meant by "EME" here? -- Picapica 12:17, 22 May 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Early Modern English. AJD 16:17, 22 May 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: How can it be EME? South African English did not exist before the early to mid 19th century! Roger (talk) 14:41, 28 October 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  EME? 

message: I don't think I'm unusual in lowering /ɛ/ to /e/ before g (as in beg, egg.)  Is there a name for this phenomenon?  What is its geographical distribution?  (I'm from California.)  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.167.203.61 (talk) 00:05, 5 January 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: That would be raising, not lowering.  I think it's pretty widespread in the western US. Grover cleveland (talk) 22:59, 26 February 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Lowering of /ɛ/ before g 

message: My ears and memory tell me that the pin-pen merger is very widespread in the United States.  This article makes it seems as if few places outside of the South have this merger.  That really doesn't seem to be the case.  Turn on the TV sometime and you will hear many non-Southern people with this merger.  Pronouncing pen with /ɛ/ sounds affected and pretentious (not to mention strange) to my ears, and I'm sure it sounds that way for many other Americans as well.  As of now, there is no comprehensive guide to American English, so I figure my guess is as good as anyone's.  I am not from the South, by the way. 208.104.45.20 (talk) 05:13, 27 April 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Some Thoughts

message: The article seems pretty clear about the distinction and merger of ee and ea.  But what it's not clear at all about is the status of long e, for example in the word mete.  In non-merging accents, is mete pronounced like meet or meat?  I know that, for long o, bone and moan had the same vowel in Early Modern English, but whether long e was the same as ee or ea in Early Modern English is not made clear. - Gilgamesh (talk) 07:12, 24 February 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm pretty sure e...e should be the same as ee. —Angr 09:31, 24 February 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: I don't want just a guess.  Did you read this somewhere?  A source, maybe? - Gilgamesh (talk) 11:11, 24 February 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: If I remember, I'll check Accents of English later today. —Angr 11:32, 24 February 2009 (UTC)

text: Words like mete (although not bone) originated in short vowels in OE.  When those short vowels lengthened, they merged with ea oa not with ee oo.  Hence mete would have sounded like meat.  In Early Modern English, ea sounded like  while ee sounded like . Benwing (talk) 05:55, 5 September 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: However, there are exceptions to that rule, as Middle English spelling often didn't bother to distinguish the heights of its long mid vowels, for instance, Chaucer spells red as "reed" (which later convention dictates should be"read"), and modern spelling has the words lose and whore, which really ought to have two Os. 104.34.32.154 (talk) 21:09, 19 January 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Meet-meat merger and simple long e (mete) 

message: I tagged this with citation needed, as my personal experience living in Pen-pin merged areas shows that context is always adequate and clarification is not needed. If no citation can be found, I suggest this sentence be removed. 129.110.116.65 (talk) 09:00, 11 March 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Pen-Pin Homophone Differentiation

message: I see the article says:
:Although this merger was not complete in the South even in fairly recent times, there is very little variation throughout the Southern States in general, except that Savannah, Austin, Miami, and New Orleans are excluded from the merger. The area of consistent merger includes southern Virginia and most of the South Midland, and extends westward to include much of Texas.
As in the statement above, I suspect that the lack of pin-pen merging occurs in many places in Texas, not just Austin.  In fact, I live in Austin and the large majority of speakers here don't have a southern accent at all, although "y'all" is fairly widespread.  A few people I know do have an accent of sorts, and they typically grew up in a small Texas town somewhere -- and even then their accent is not very strong. I think a lot of the reason for this is that most people who live here (like me) aren't from here, and hence the "native" accent is drowned in a sea of GA speakers.  Same goes probably for the other large cities in Texas -- and probably throughout the south.  A good friend of mine grew up in the suburbs of Houston and she has no accent (i.e. a GA accent!).  A friend of mine grew up in Atlanta and he had no accent either. Benwing (talk) 06:04, 5 September 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  pin-pen merger and Texas (again) 

message: I'm using IE, and I'm trying to make it so incoming links from Happy tensing take me to the right section, but it always jumps to a footnote after doing so. If anyone knows the secret, I'd be grateful. Victor Yus (talk) 19:01, 23 May 2012 (UTC)
thread_title: Technical trouble

message: What's that called and is there an article or article section on it? I've noticed it most in the speech of people from the New Jersey and southern New York area. One example, instead of rādiator they say rădiator. Bizzybody (talk) 03:40, 12 October 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: It's called a person without phonemic length distinction in their speech whose vowels are always phonetically short. In English, that sounds distinctively non-native due to pre-fortis clipping or, in Northern UK, Scottish Vowel Length Rule. — Peter238 (v̥ɪˑzɪʔ mɑˑɪ̯ tˢʰoˑk̚ pʰɛˑɪ̯d̥ʒ̊) 19:10, 16 February 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  People who never use long vowel sounds? 

message: In which word rhymes with /ɨr/ ? Fort123 (talk) 19:09, 25 April 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: I don't know. I have no idea what words are supposed to end in an /ɨr/ that is potentially (or ever was) distinct from /ər/. Angr (talk) 20:27, 25 April 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: Maybe satyr ? Fort123 (talk) 22:19, 25 April 2013 (UTC)

text: appears only word-medially before a vowel. Maryland is a good candidate for the analysis  as the normal pronunciation of the second vowel is  in the US and  in the UK. You'd have to do some research to find (near-)minimal pairs with other vowels. Crap, that's . In that case I don't even have an example for this sequence. I'm sure you could find one. Sol505000 (talk) 19:14, 22 March 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  weak vowel merger 

message: The article currently says this: "South Africans are often stereotyped as pronouncing "woman" and "women" the same way, as "women" has the vowel [ə]. In reality, they are distinct in South African English. "woman" is /wʊmən/ and "women" is /wəmən/, so they are distinct and never confused."
I have asked quite a few South African English speakers about this, and each and every one has told me that "woman" and "women" *are* homophonous, and I have observed confusion based on this. So, unless there's a legitimate source, I suggest this addendum be removed (it's not terribly relevant to the kit/bit split in the first place anyway).WmGB (talk) 11:39, 28 January 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  kit-bit and South African English 

message: It is not clear what merged into what in the introduction. Had the vowel in "meet" already shifted to [iː] back then? Because it continues with describing different stages of English, which is really confusing. --2.245.156.161 (talk) 05:00, 9 October 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: I can answer this question.  To start in Middle English, meet was pronounced as [], and meat was pronounced [].  During the Great Vowel Shift, meet became [], and meat became [].  Answering your question, right before the meet-meat merger, meet was pronounced as [].  At this time, meat was pronounced [].  The merger occurred by raising the vowel in meat from [] to [].74.102.216.186 (talk) 04:11, 17 November 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  meet–meat merger 

message: Please add to the article answers to the following questions:
# Why is the meat-meet merger also called the fleece merger?
# Why is fleece written in lower caps? (If there's no reason for it, please remove.)
Thank you! DBlomgren (talk) 05:10, 1 September 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Fleece merger 

message: The section on 'happy tensing' states that the use of the tenser 'i' form (equivalent to the 'ee' of 'fleet') is 'becoming more common in modern RP'.  The only authority cited is a book by J. C. Wells finalised around 1980 (his Preface is dated January 1981).  This is nearly 40 years old, and I would say that the 'old' pronunciation is now practically extinct.  At least, I think the article should say that the tenser form *was* stated to be becoming more common around 1980 without implying that this is still the case.  Personally, I think the 'old' form was a minority usage long before this.  We now have easy access to many old recordings as a basis for comparison.  For example, Kenneth Clark in his 'Civilisation' series in 1969 uses the 'new' form, and I presume Clark would be accepted as a true RP speaker. Or Patrick Macnee (an Old Etonian playing an upper-class character) uses the 'new' pronunciation in his role as John Steed in 'The Avengers' (mid-60s).  In fact, I have not found any clear examples of the supposed traditional pronunciation from any period, though in some cases the speaker's vowels are so clipped that it is difficult to be sure quite what they are saying.109.149.2.121 (talk) 15:11, 2 April 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Happy-tensing 

message: It recently occurred to me that there are certain words with  in Received Pronunciation that sometimes have  in addition to  in General American: for instance, the first syllables of before and enough. In many of these the vowel is in an unstressed syllable immediately before the stress. I wonder if this is commented on in any sources. — Eru·tuon 22:24, 11 September 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Exceptions to weak-vowel merger in General American 

message: The article says that when a non-rhotic accent has the weak-vowel merger, then historic /ər/ automatically merges with the weak vowel as well. This is not true for German L2-speakers, who usually have a weak-vowel merger (or at most a very feeble and irregular distinction), but who commonly use [ɐ] for /ər/, which is distinct from /ə/. This means that chatted is [tʃɛtəd], but chattered is [tʃɛtɐd]. But I suppose there are no native accents that do this, are there? (Then nevermind.)  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2.201.0.62 (talk) 00:15, 23 March 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: No, there aren't. And if there are they're a really small group of speakers that I'm unaware of. Sol505000 (talk) 18:48, 1 September 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Weak-vowel merger in non-rhotic accents 

message: We could mention here that in many broad conservative varieties of the Black Country dialect ‘meat’ has a long e unlike ‘meet’ and I’ve heard some odd short vowels in Northern Ireland, such as ‘pen’ sounding like ‘pan’ to me (as an Englishman) and of course some of the Protestants there famously say ‘flag’ as ‘fleg’. Overlordnat1 (talk) 22:19, 4 November 2021 (UTC)
thread_title: Northern Ireland and Black Country

message: I am not into orthoepy and am not in possession of any works on linguistics, but I noticed that there is evidence of all three realisations of the happY vowel in some of the earliest English pronouncing dictionaries: Kenrick (1773) gives [ɪ],Busy is said to have two identical vowel sounds, both corresponding to the number 15 in superscript, so  and  must be the same.Source: A New Dictionary of the English Language Sheridan (1780) gives [i] as distinct from both [ɪ] and [iː],According to Sheridan: 'The third sounds in e and i, beer, field, are also the same. [So, as English was still rhotic at the time, beer (now ) contains the  of field and could be transcribed as .] The sound of o [] in not, is only the short sound of a [] in hall. The second sound of u [] in bush is only the short sonud of o [] in noose...And with regard to the two sounds of y, the first perceived in the last syllable of lovely, is only the short sound of e [that is , as previously established] in beer, and the second in lye is the same as i in fight.' So, just as  is a shortened , and  is a shortened , the final vowel of lovely (that is ) is a shortened . This does not yet make it distinct from . But Sheridan then proceeds to include what he denotes as i (defined as the vowel of fit, that is ) in the reduced set of sounds, which he effectuated by eliminating a number of sounds from the inventory, including the aforesaid final vowel of lovely (that is ), implying is distinctness from i and thus . At the same time, it is 'shorter' and therefore distinct from . Source:A General Dictionary of the English Language whilst Walker (1791) gives [iː].'The unaccented sound of this letter [y] at the end of a syllable, like that of i in the same situation, is always like the first sound of e []: thus vanity, pleurisy, &c., if sound alone were consulted, might be written vanitee, pleurisee, &c.'Source:A Critical Pronouncing Dictionary Ergo, the statement that it had not been mentioned by linguists until the early XX century seems false – and by quite a margin; not being very confident in the field, I hope someone with better access to writings on English phonology might be able to find some more information on this topic and perhaps improve the section.
Walker.
--Maciuf (talk) 12:56, 4 January 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Happy tensing attested by linguists as early as 1780 with no mention in this article. 

message: Never mind the far far rarer Scottish (and Kiwi and South African) variant ‘fush and chups’, why no mention here of the standard Scottish pronunciation (which I would personally say is more common in Glasgow and Ayrshire than elsewhere) of ‘fesh and cheps’? Overlordnat1 (talk) 07:23, 9 January 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Scottish 

message: Should every example be sourced? With recent additions the tables are looking strange, with peculiar examples like Lemmy || Limmy, Seine || sin, seraph || serif, 
Stata'd || started and Lennon || Lenin. IMO examples should include common words, not names or smth like 'Stata'd' (what does it even mean?). Artem.G (talk) 07:47, 22 June 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: Stata’d looks like nonsense to me as not only can I find no evidence that Stata can be used as a verb, or what it would mean if it were used that way, but the pronunciation we have for the first syllable of Stata isn’t one that many people would use for the first syllable of started in any case. By all means delete the offending example from this article. Overlordnat1 (talk) 09:45, 22 June 2023 (UTC)

text: I strongly feel that xamples of words that become homophones under merger should be a handful of illustrative examples involving common words, not exhaustive lists of every pair of words or pseudowords that could become confusable. AJD (talk) 14:15, 22 June 2023 (UTC)
replies: text:  Thanks for comments! I removed some examples as discussed, abd added few sources. Feel free to trim the tables, if you think some entries are wrong. Artem.G (talk) 09:14, 23 June 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Examples of ‎Pin–pen merger and ‎Weak vowel merger 

message: Surely you mean Rose's here? 142.205.202.71 (talk) 17:32, 2 July 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: No. Nardog (talk) 22:13, 2 July 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Rosa's