Talk:Phonemic differentiation/Archive 2

message: To my knowledge, there are dialects that merge the pronunciation of the words goaty and goatee. I don't know which dialects. Who knows about it? Or should I just go ahead and start this section without saying where this merger occurs? J. 'mach' wust • tskʃpræːx 10:20, 4 May 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Different how? I don't know the word goaty, but if asked to pronounce it I guess I'd say  (or  if it were a familiar word), while goatee is . In other words, the difference between them is stress, not phonemes. --Angr/comhrá 12:37, 4 May 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Ach, phonology vs. stress! Suppose one defends a phoneme /ɨ/: Then this might be considered a minimal pair of /ɨ/ and . I would however agree that the main distinction of the two is better described in terms of stress. Yet still, I think this article is the most appropiate place to mention this merger, since the main purpose of this article seems to be the description of pronunciation mergers (we might consider moving this article to pronunciation merger). J. 'mach' wust • tskʃpræːx 13:13, 4 May 2005 (UTC)

text: "Phonology vs. stress"? Stress is part of phonology, isn't it? I'm definitely against expanding the article to include any sort of pronunciation merger regardless of whether it concerns phonemes or not. The article is already difficult to maintain, having a way-too-long list of splits and mergers in all imaginable English accents, and being constantly subject to unverifiable, unsourced additions by anonymous users (such as the "hippy-hippie merger" above). And, not to belabor the point, I'm definitely against adding anything that isn't widely known and discussed in the linguistic literature. --Angr/comhrá 15:29, 4 May 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I don't understand: On one hand, you're saying stress is part of phonology, but on the other hand, you're also saying that the difference between goaty and goatee is not phonemes, but stress. J. 'mach' wust • tskʃpræːx 18:12, 4 May 2005 (UTC)

text: Phonemes are the contrastive segments (vowels and consonants) of a language. Phonology is the entire sound system of the language, involving not only vowels and consonants, but the distinctive features that make up phonemes, as well as stress and/or tone, syllable structure, and intonation. --Angr/comhrá 19:24, 4 May 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: That makes sense! Thanks a lot for the explanation! J. 'mach' wust • tskʃpræːx 20:39, 4 May 2005 (UTC)

text: The phenomenon you mention is discussed at happy tensing. --Angr/탉 12:57, 25 May 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Goaty-goatee merger

message: I don't understand the difference between these two mergers. Is the difference in pour underlying the Horse-hoarse merger? J. 'mach' wust • tskʃpræːx 09:23, 14 May 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I hadn't noticed they were both there. You're perfectly right, they're the same merger. I'll fix it. --Angr/comhrá 09:38, 14 May 2005 (UTC)

text: They are the same merger, but they don't apply to the same words for all people. In particular, Americans are likely to use  after palatals like [j], and so many say  for cure. But for the people who pronounce it , it's all part of the same merger. --Angr/comhrá 05:28, 15 May 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Maybe you've spent too long away from home, Angr.  :-p   Most Americans say [ki:ɹ] or ['ki ə] for "cure"... I've been all over "this great land of ours", and I've never heard "kyaw" for "cure".  I must admit, I find little to support your  claims.  West of the Connecticut River especially, such a pronunciation would be regarded in the US as "foreign", and east of the Connecticut, from my experience, it would be regarded as pedantic, and certainly not characteristic of common speech anywhere in the US.  For most people in the US, cur rhymes with fur, and cure (almost) rhymes with fear.  I don't know if there are different mergers going on here or what, but clearly there's a disconnect between the observations.  I have never heard a dialect of AmE that rhymes cure with fir (although I've often heard "for" pronounced as if it were spelt "fir"), nor have I ever heard of a pour-pure merger.  The pour-poor merger, however, is almost universal in my experience, although some speakers make a conscious attempt to differentiate between the two, pronouncing them pu:wr (or even pwɝ:) and pu:r, respectively.  I honestly believe these differentiations to be hypercorrection.  As I may have mentioned at some point in the past, I live in a something of a hyper-literate town.  Tomer TALK 07:19, May 15, 2005 (UTC)
I never claimed  was an American pronunciation. I think it's a British (and probably Southern Hemisphere) pronunciaton. But I've certainly never heard cure pronounced keer by anyone, American or otherwise. The American pronunciations I'm familiar with are  and  (to rhyme with fur). Tomer, do you have any sources for the  pronunciation? I think it's really interesting that there are people who pronounce it that way; I'd like to read up on it. Anyway, I think I'm going to combine all the sections about the outcomes of EME  into one section, where we can discuss the fact that some people merge it with  (in at least some words), some people merge it with  (in at least some words), and, apparently, some people merge it with  (in at least some words). But whatever we say it's important to provide sources for all our claims; all the Wikipedia articles on English accents and dialects suffer from too much unsubstantiated "the people around here say it this way; the people over there say it that way" and not enough citation of verifiable sources. (I confess I've been guilty of doing that too.) --Angr/comhrá 10:57, 15 May 2005 (UTC)

text: You'll notice I haven't modified the article to reflect my unsourced claim.  :-p  Unlike you, apparently, I've heard lots of people say "keer".  In fact, most of the time words are shown written pseudophonetically in dictionaries, they use the system you are relying on.  I think it's outdated.  the [u:] -> [ju:] has long since split into two (or more) different realizations: primarily,  /ju:/ initially and /i:w/ following consonants.  Where the /j/ has modified the preceding consonant, however, it's sometimes anyone's guess what vowel the original [u] will be realized as.  Sounds like something someone shirley (sic) has written a doctoral dissertation on, but I haven't found it yet... Tomer TALK 17:01, May 15, 2005 (UTC)
I'm pretty sure using  in words like beauty, cute, etc., is actually older than using . At any rate it was almost certainly more like  in Early Modern English. Using  after consonants is the innovative pronunciation. But a shift of  to  is probably an innovation. I've never heard this dialect, so I'm very curious about it. Does it make homophones of pure and peer? Does curious rhyme with serious? What about after coronals? Is endure a homophone of endear? Is sure a homophone of sheer? --Angr/comhrá 17:55, 15 May 2005 (UTC)

text: So come to Wisconsin. :-)  Usually, yes, pure and peer are homophonous.  Curious and serious rhyme.  Endure is "in 'du:r" (the "i" there is wrong, but I don't have time right now to find the IPA symbol for a syllabalized "n"...), while endear "in 'di:r".  Sure is sh.r (syllabalized r), while sheer is shi:r.  Shire, on the other hand, is "sh/\ j.r", where the /\ is a short a (a "uh", not to be confused with schwa).  Shire and shier do not rhyme tho, as the /a/ in shier is [a:], rather than [/\].  Tomer TALK 18:54, May 15, 2005 (UTC)
Here in California most people have  for "cure," not . I have  for "endure" and  for "endear." Tomer, I definitely wouldn't say <<Most Americans say [ki:ɹ] or ['ki ə] for "cure">>, altho apparently some dialects may have that. Svenska84 19:56, 16 Jun 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: force-cure vs. pour-pure

message: As far as I know the sounds  and  are allophones of the phenome , not separate phonemes in Australian English.  Correct me if I'm wrong, but one of the ways of telling the difference between phenomes and allophones is to use minimal pairs, isn't it? And if so, then there arn't any minimal pairs in Australian English for these two sounds. – AxSkov (T) 13:47, 24 May 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I have e-mails from linguists who are native speakers of both Australian English and English English who claim to have minimal pairs between the noun (and denominative verb)  and the auxiliary verb  and between the noun  and the past-tense verb , or near-minimal pairs between long ,  and short , . Apparently the two can contrast only before voiced obstruents and nasals, though, and not everyone does it, which is why I hedged with "some varieties of" English English and Austrlian English. There's more about it in the works cited as well (Wells, Burridge, Leitner). --Angr/comhrá 14:07, 24 May 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: The differentiation between /kæn/ and /kæ:n/ isn't limited to BrE and AuE.  The noun and its related verb are usually pronounced with /æ:/ or with æ-tensing in Wisconsin, but the auxiliary verb is unaffected by æ-tensing, and in unstressed positions is usually pronounced  (although not in "can't", as I've mentioned before, in which it is usually pronounced ). Tomer TALK 17:27, May 24, 2005 (UTC)
There's a fellow at Yale named Erich Round, from Melbourne, who's written a paper arguing that the Australian pattern is some sort of combination of the RP pattern and the Mid-Atlantic pattern. He's sent me a PDF of his paper (which I haven't read yet), but unfortunately (for him and for us if we wanted to cite it) he hasn't been able to get it published. --Angr/comhrá 17:41, 24 May 2005 (UTC)

text: Is it possible for me to get a copy of this PDF? or is such a question from a nobody on the Internet considered inappropriate? Felix the Cassowary 11:27, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Bad-lad split 

message: There is some discussion on California English of the raising of front vowels before /ŋ/. In fact, in at least my dialect, there is a merger of /æ/ and /ɛ/ before /ŋ/ (to /e/). Does anyone know of anything in the literature describing this? Does it merit a mention here? Is there a name for it? Can anyone think of something better than engle-angle? maybe Bengal-bangle? Cheng-Chang? Nohat 3 July 2005 16:44 (UTC)
:I first heard of this from you, several months ago, when you mentioned pronouncing bank , but I don't know of any literature on it.  is a pretty rare sequence in English anyway (the only native words I know of that have it are length and strength), so minimal pairs will be hard to find. What does "engle" mean? --Angr/ 3 July 2005 19:53 (UTC)
::Mebbe he meant Engels.  :-)  Tomer TALK July 3, 2005 20:04 (UTC)
::Engle is a common name-morph, as in the names Englebert, Englehart, Engleman, Englewood, Engleking, etc., which sometimes also occurs as a name by itself; see e.g. . Nohat 06:26, 20 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  engle-angle merger? 

message: Another merger I realized recently that I have, but which is definitely not overwhelmingly common, even around here in California, is the merger of  and  before /l/ to . Thus dull and bull are rhymes. There don't appear to be any minimal pairs for this distinction, so I suppose it should be hardly surprising that there is a merger for some people. Is there anything in the literature about this one? Does it have a name? Can anyone think of anything better than "dull-bull"? "null-full"? "bull-bulk"? I have trouble finding these because I have no intuition about which words have  and which have , unlike the above where which is which can be determined by the spelling.  Nohat 3 July 2005 16:57 (UTC)
*To help you out, although I know around here (Wisconsin) pronounce what you are calling  as a syllabic l, i.e., the only vowel is the l itself:
** : dull, null, hull, bulk, sulk, hulk, pulp, etc.
** : bull, full, pull, etc.         Tomer TALK July 3, 2005 18:42 (UTC)
:Tomer, which vowel do you have in pulpit? I have  but I've heard people say it with . --Angr/ 3 July 2005 19:46 (UTC)
::I gots .  Tomer TALK July 3, 2005 20:05 (UTC)
: It doesn't seem to be predictable at all when it's  and it's . Is there any cue, whether synchronic or diachronic, to indicate which vowel it is? Or do speakers without this merger simply have to memorize which word has which vowel? Nohat 3 July 2005 21:22 (UTC)
:: I know of no cue.  I didn't rely on memorization, it's just the way I learned English, and the way which I'm accustomed to hearing it spoken around me.  I have a question for you now.  When you say Fulton or Folsom, what vowels do you use before the l?  Tomer TALK July 3, 2005 21:33 (UTC)
::: Well, you must have memorized it if there's no cue. Fulton = , like full+/tən/; Folsom = /folsəm/, like foal+/səm/. However, the /o/ is probably pronounced more like , but I don't think I have any phonemic s in my native phoneme inventory. Nohat 3 July 2005 22:05 (UTC)
:::: It's not exactly memorisation, because you don't learn them from spelling. Its like saying you have to memorise which words have /U/ and words words have /i/, because even though there's the spelling, you don't rely on it to specify how you talk normally. Most -ull words you'll learn from speech, rather than spelling. Felix the Cassowary 4 July 2005 00:43 (UTC)
It's memorization, it's just not active memorization (sitting down with flash cards and studying them). Instead it's the automatic memorization that makes up all of L1 acquisition. --Angr/ 4 July 2005 05:22 (UTC)
:Heh.  Or in my case, L3.  :-p  Tomer TALK July 4, 2005 05:45 (UTC)
* This merger is mentioned near the bottom of one of the draft chapters of the Atlas of North American English, which has a link from the fill/feel and fell/fail section: .--JHJ 4 July 2005 12:06 (UTC)
Yeah, it lists four mergers at the end of that chapter:
*The bull-bowl merger
*The hull-hall merger
*The bull-hull merger
*The hull-hole merger
unsigned comment left at 19:36, 4 July 2005 by User:205.188.117.14
:Of which 0 people had the hull-hole merger --Angr/ 4 July 2005 19:48 (UTC)
::I've done some (obviously original) research around my office and the bull-hull merger does not appear to be very common, even among natives of the same area as me. However, I have definitely found some other people that have it. They have been people who acquired English in the south bay. People from San Francisco and the east bay don't have this merger. My sample size is pretty small though, although the test is fairly easy: I just ask "do dull and full rhyme"? Nohat 06:32, 20 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  dull-bull merger? 

message: A question, for those who know more linguistics than me, about the "fleece merger".  This page says that some speakers in northern England retain a distinction, with [I@] in the meat group and [i:] or [@i] in the meet group.  There's some evidence, some of which has appeared on Yorkshire dialect and accent that it's more complicated than this, in that some (but not all) words in the meat set actually have [EI] (or similar) as in eight.
I have a copy of a book about traditional Sheffield dialect (Orreight mi ol' , by Don Alexander) which uses the spelling "eigh" for the vowels of eat and meat but the spelling "eea" (which I would think means [I@] or similar) for the vowels of team and cream.  There's also a web page about Calderdale accents (linked from Yorkshire dialect and accent) which states that eat and meat rhyme with eight.  (These accents generally have a weight/wait distinction, so I don't think there's a suggestion that meat and mate are homophonous.)
Any idea what's going on here?  Is there a historic reason for eat and team to have different vowels?
--JHJ 20:18, 19 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Possibly: team and cream have original long vowels, going back to Old English tēam and French crème respectively, while eat (< OE etan) and meat (< OE mete) have vowels that were originally short but lengthened by open syllable lengthening. Maybe there are northern dialects where lengthened short vowels became  just like old , while old  became . Or maybe it depends on whether the following consonant was m or t. --Angr/ 22:27, 19 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: It could be just random; as far as I know, there's no explanation for why "great" and "meat" no longer rhyme except for partial lexical diffusion.  Similar things seem to have split mass/crass from pass/class/glass/grass in British English. Benwing 03:56, 20 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, in some dialects of British English (they all rhyme for me), but I know what you mean.  Anyway, thanks to both of you for your prompt answers.  I suspect it could actually be a mixture of all three explanations.--JHJ 16:20, 20 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Fleece merger 

message: Here's what L. Craig Schoonmaker http://www.geocities.com/sswordday/ has to say about the ferry-furry distinction:
* Quote-THIS is the famous "distinction without a difference", except that there are about 4 times as many -erry's as -urry's. And please note that Dictionary gives woor.ee, foor.ee, and hoor.ee (that's the sound that the U with a 'hat' (circumflex accent) shows: short-OO), which I have not heard so regard as bizarre. Either they heard wrong or they're on drugs. 
+ 
* Dictionary, oddly, is sometimes just plain wrong. For instance, "water" is not shown there as ever being pronounced "wut.er", but I listened very carefully to reports of water-main breaks on TV stations in the New York Tristate Metropolitan Area (the broadcasting capital of North America), and wut.er is plainly the pronunciation educated people in this area give that word. The SSWD project, of course, cannot offer "water" precisely because it has more than one common pronunciation. 
+ 
* If you put together the -erry's and the -ery's pronounced the same, you get a MASS of words with ER as the crucial spelling, but if you try to use -ury rather than -urry, you get a completely different sound. So I think we'll go with -erry. But I appreciate your views. Cheers. 
* Quote-UR, ER, OR, and AR may be pronounced with tiny differences by SOME speakers in SOME dialects as to SOME words. I went to your URL for the Cambridge dictionary, which offers TWO bizarre transliterations (which may or may not be rendered in standard IPA but is opaque to me -- IPA transliterations tend to proceed from the positions of vocal apparatus of the linguists who speak them in preparing to write them; SSWD is concerned about what people HEAR, and if they hear no difference between, for instance, vaann and venn for French "vin", it doesn't matter to them whether the person saying it forms the word one way, because the listener hears it the same no matter which way a speaker might articulate it). Most to the point, the Cambridge dictionary shows TWO pronunciations, British dialect and American standard. 
+ 
* I then went to the Merriam-Webster URLs for the other words and clicked on the speaker icon to listen to the pronunciations rendered, in American English, and found no distinction worth making. All those words would rhyme PERFECTLY as most people regard things. Of course, we could avoid the problem altogether by saying that there are two different pronunciations for "worry", so the word can't be changed! 
+ 
* For most ordinary , for whom the SSWD project is intended, not for linguistics specialists, there is between a great many word pairs or groups, no difference worth 'worrying' about. There are a lot of overeducated people who have bugaboos about tiny matters of no consequence, and will argue them endlessly, to everyone else's tedium. I'm not about to argue the linguistic equivalent of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, a subject that may have fascinated some medieval theologians but nobody else. 
+ 
* The SSWD project is about NEEDED change, and preferably changes that people can readily apply to things they HEAR. One transliteration for a small range of actual sounds is convenient, and all spelling is convention. Few speakers of standard English distinguish in sound between "ferry" and "furry". Having a distinction in spelling for these two HOMONYMS is useful. As to which spelling you favor for a reform of "worry", I have noted that you favor "wurry". 
+ 
* The problem may be only that a following-R tends to alter the quality of the vowel before it, for some speakers more than others. I have not yet offered this word (which you plainly render "wurd" and I render "werd") and might select "wurry", on the basis that some people might see it as parallel to "merry", which they pronounce like "Mary". Or I may not offer it at all, since, as some people regard things, it has two pronunciations so cannot be changed if a change would antagonize some significant body of speakers. I am asking for more comments. Cheers. 
* Quote- YES, I noted that in checking "merge", some dictionaries use the U with a hat as the vowel. But in any case, that is the ER sound, as shown plainly by the sample words in Dictionary.com's own pronunciation key: "urge, term, firm, word, heard". 
+ 
* As for "ont", I suggested that because "ant" is a homophone we can eliminate from a language filled to overflowing with homophones, and seems to those of us who say "ont" -- meaning a large proportion of the best-educated people in the U.S. and almost everybody in Britain, Australia, New Zealand, the Caribbean, etc. -- that calling a person by a homophone for an insect is arguably disrespectful. I have no power to impose anything, and the SSWD site is designed mainly to make people think. As for "tord", too-waurd is a spelling pronunciation, and as with ev-er-y and other spelling pronunciations (which my Random House Unabridged labels so people know better than to use them), spelling reformers can properly advise people that tho they think they are being careful to be correct, they are actually being wrong. 
+ 
* The distinction between "ferry" and "furry" is, I repeat, not "worth making. All those words would rhyme PERFECTLY as most people regard things." People who try to draw needless distinctions and force people to try to supply only one of essentially interchangeable spellings do spelling reform a disservice. This is not the distinction between "merry" rhyming with "berry" and "merry" rhyming with "Mary". It is TRIVIA that ordinary people do not waste time on and cannot justify wasting educational time and money on. If you see a poem in which one line ends with "ferry" and the next appropriate line ends in "furry" or "worry" or "cherry" or "very", will you be startled by an appalling lack of rhyme? If so, you are one in perhaps 15,000 people. 
+ 
* Native speakers of English cannot and do not make the short-E as in "bed" and follow it with R in the same syllable and come out with anything like what most people say for "very", "berry", etc. Following-R changes the quality of many vowels in its same syllable. 
+ 
* Make all the silly and PRETENTIOUS distinctions you want. Ordinary people concerned with communication rather than language as an arcane study to itself will not trouble to heed you. 205.188.117.14 04:30, 3 August 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: There is apparently some troll/spammer that goes round to various English-related forums and posts links to that SSWD webpage, asking people's opinion on Schoonmaker's opinion. This is probly just one more example. I'm not sure if either he or Schoonmaker has a point, other than getting us all to read his webpage. Felix the Cassowary 07:08, 3 August 2005 (UTC)

text: I don't know what this guy is smoking, but I speak a variety of American English with a large number of mergers, some of them apparently quite rare (like NULL-FULL), but everyone that I know has a FURRY-FERRY distinction. I certainly have a MARY-MERRY-MARRY merger, but not a MURRAY-MERRY merger. I grant that probably somewhere some people have this merger, but it's certainly not very widespread and the rest of this rant is obviously ignorant ramblings. As for "spelling reform", I think all the phonemic differentiations listed in this article make for quite a nice argument against it, at least any of the completely phonemic systems that some "spelling reform" advocates advocate. Nohat 07:25, 3 August 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I took a look at that site and it's actually quite hilarious. It's the workings of a person, who, when faced with the fact that some people speak differently from him, decided to invent a system for writing English that enshrines the particular regionally marked variety that he speaks as the new "standard".  It's quite humorous, really, the idea of maintaining the MERRY-MARY-MARRY distinction, which for a majority of AmE speakers is completely merged, and for the most of the rest, partially merged, but creating, out of whole cloth, a MURRAY-MERRY merger, that almost nobody has, simply because it doesn't fit easily into his transcription system. Some of the explanations in his dictionary  are also quite hysterical (not to mention inconsistent and capricious): "Banal" is an unusual and pretentious word. An unusual and pretentious pronunciation suits it..."Epoch" should not be confused with "epic", so either [ˈɛpɑk] or [ˈipɑk] is preferable to [ˈɛpək]. A long-E seems appropriate for a word that refers to a long time. The assertions behind supposed "correct" pronunciations make Charles Herrington Elster (of The Big Book of Beastly Mispronunciations) look erudite and linguistically informed (two things which if you've read the book you will easily come to the conclusion that Mr. Elster is not).  New Yorkers sure are full of themselves.  [flɑrɪdə] and [ɔrəgɑn], indeed! Nohat 08:36, 3 August 2005 (UTC)

text: Yeah, the MERRY-MURRAY merger seemed vaguely familiar. One thing for certain, though, is that it is decidedly not is a feature of GenAm. Which of the MARY-MERRY-MARRY mergers is part of GenAm is debatable, certainly, but MERRY-MURRAY is defintely regionally marked (for Philly, apparently). On the latter, I'd say that the full 3-way distinction is (very marginally) marked, but any of the merger combinations, whether maintaining a 2-way distinction or no distinction at all, is not marked. But there are those who disagree. Canepari for example calls maintaining the 3-way distinction "neutral", which is his term for unmarked GenAm. On a totally separate topic, I'm curious which "various English-related forums" this troll has been visiting. Cheers! Nohat 07:49, 5 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Furry-ferry merger 

message: I'm no linguist but I chanced on this article and I'm intrigued. My girlfriend (born in Northern Ireland and raised in northwestern England) pronounces "book" and "buck" close-to-identically (I think it's : in IPA), whereas I (brought up in southern England) use : in "book" and : in "buck". Similarly, for her "pussy" (as in cat) and "pussy" (as in "full of pus"") are the same, whereas I make a distinction. Her attempt at my "southern" pronounciation of the latter verges towards "passy"...: or even :. Is this a recognised example of phonemic differentiation or have I missed the point? Dave.Dunford 05:10, 13 October 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes, it is. See Foot-strut split for the one you're talking about. --Angr/ 06:59, 13 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Book-buck