Talk:Phonological history of English high front vowels

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[edit] Moved from Talk:Weak vowel merger

[edit] 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/tɔk tə mi 07:18, 4 October 2005 (UTC)
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)

I'm from Sydney, Australia. I do rhyme abbot and rabit and my pretended is /prətendəd/. Jimp 19Dec05

[edit] Article content

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)


[edit] Moved from Talk:Kit-bit split

[edit] New Zealand English

I've changed the last two paragraphs:

Realization of the vowel in bit as [ə] is also found in New Zealand English. Unlike in South African English, that phoneme is always realized as [ə] and so there is no split and kit and bit rhyme in New Zealand English as /kət/ and /bət/. Some Australians commonly claim that New Zealanders say fush and chups for fish and chips, but that is an exaggeration, because the pronunciation for New Zealanders is actually like [fəʃ ən tʃəps] (with a stressed schwa sound), not *[fʌʃ ən tʃʌps].
New Zealanders conversely often claim that Australians pronounce fish and chips as feesh and cheeps, because /i/ is the closest equivalent New Zealanders have to the Australian /ɪ/. The Australian /ɪ/ is slightly more raised than the /ɪ/ in other accents.

into one much shorter one:

Centralized realizations of the vowel in bit is also found in New Zealand English. Unlike in South African English, this does not involve a phonemic or allophonic split.

New Zealand English does not have a kit-bit split, so a discussion of what happens in New Zealand English isn't really relevant. With those two paragraphs, the article is one-third about the kit-bit split and two-thirds about some different phenomenon that only involves the same phoneme and a similar realisation of it. It also seems a bit odd having so much discussion about perceptions of Australians' and New Zealanders' language use (and what they do) in an article about a phenomenon limited to South African English.

—Felix the Cassowary (ɑe hɪː jɐ) 03:57, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

Hear! Hear! Jimp 03:55, 21 December 2005 (UTC)
... I've thus removed the following.
In New Zealand English this extends to stressed /ɪ/s as well, so that dinner is pronounced /dənə/.
This is not a vowel split/merger but a vowel shift. Jimp 13Jan06

[edit] Trigger for Lennon-Lenin

What is the trigger condition for the Lennon-Lenin merger? Linguofreak 23:37, 18 March 2006 (UTC)

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 [ɪ] and [ə] are merged to [ə]. The "classic" example is roses vs. Rosa's: in accents without the merger, the two words are different, [rozɪz] vs. [rozəz], while in accents with the merger, the two words are homophonous as [rozəz]. Mergers aren't usually described as having "triggers" the way phonological rules are. Angr/talk 23:43, 18 March 2006 (UTC)
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)
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)

[edit] Pin-Pen merger and Arkansas

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)

[edit] EME?

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)

Early Modern English. AJD 16:17, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Lowering of /ɛ/ before g

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)

[edit] Some Thoughts

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)

[edit] Idea-smoothing is NOT original research

Just so that you know, I have been watching a lot of American television, and I can guarantee that many Americans DO in fact have idea-smoothing in their speech. The first and last episodes of Deep Space Nine have Odo (Rene Auberjonois or whatever) and Jake Sisko (Cirroc Lofton) respectively, both saying "idea" with /I@/ at the end, not /i:@/. Jonathan Kent (John Schneider) in Smallville also says it the same way.

I don't know how to cite a television programme as a source, but there you go. If anyone else sees a programme with idea-smoothing in it, American or not, it might be worth mentioning it here, just so that people know it most certainly DOES exist in American English and many other forms of English. Avengah (talk) 02:48, 29 April 2008 (UTC)

Saying "I heard it on a TV show" is original research. You have to find a published source that says idea-smoothing is found in North American English. —Angr 04:23, 29 April 2008 (UTC)
Although René Murat Auberjonois (the actor who played Odo) is an American, he spent much of his childhood resident in Europe. —SlamDiego←T 12:42, 29 April 2008 (UTC)
Whether it is OR or not, I don't hear it that often. I have heard it, but I think the majority of Americans don't have it. 208.104.45.20 (talk) 19:58, 29 April 2008 (UTC)

Also? "Idea smoothing", like almost all of the section headings in this article except "pin-pen merger", and some of the section headings in Phonological history of English low back vowels, is a neologism. The name "idea-smoothing" appears to have been invented for this article; I don't believe it's used by linguists. Likewise "met-mat merger", "lot-cloth split", and so on. AJD (talk) 21:16, 29 April 2008 (UTC)

"Lot-cloth split" was used by J. C. Wells in Accents of English in 1982, so that one's not a neologism. A lot of the others are, though. —Angr 04:10, 30 April 2008 (UTC)
I stand corrected on that one. AJD (talk) 04:17, 30 April 2008 (UTC)
Wells also uses palm-lot merger for what we call the "father-bother merger"; that is, he defines the mergers, splits etc. in terms of his lexical sets--trap, goose, fleece, goat, and so on. Jack(Lumber) 19:16, 2 May 2008 (UTC)
True. But "father-bother merger" is also a common name for that merger—indeed, much more common than "palm-lot merger". AJD (talk) 21:52, 2 May 2008 (UTC)
...probably because this phenomenon is peculiar to (and has been studied mostly in) North America, and Wells's lexical sets are more popular in the UK than they are in the U.S. Jack(Lumber) 15:14, 5 May 2008 (UTC)

I've got another one. Chakotay (Robert Beltram) in Voyager, Season 1 episode 7 "Eye of the Needle", at 5 minutes in. Clearly /I@/. Avengah (talk) 07:55, 7 May 2008 (UTC)

You're still doing “original research” here. (And you're proposing that the accent of a character supposedly raised on an utterly different planet be taken as American. The closest that one gets to an utterly different planet in America is probably California.) —SlamDiego←T 08:49, 7 May 2008 (UTC)
I think you'll find that Robert Beltram uses his normal accent to play the part. He doesn't put any kind of special accent on. Anyway, he's human in Voyager. Avengah (talk) 13:33, 7 May 2008 (UTC)
No one here denied that Chakotay were human (we also of course don't deny that the British are human), but he's plainly not an American. (Any American character on that show would be a time-traveller, or would have a hypothetical accent, and even then the hypothesis would likely be the work of hacks and of hams.) Now, for a bit, let's pretend that “original research” were allowed: Why are you referring us to Chakotay, instead of one of the appearances by Beltram that you'd heard by which you know he uses his ordinary accent?
Anyway, “original research” isn't permitted; an editor cannot use his own “ear” to legitimize content in an article. —SlamDiego←T 10:33, 12 May 2008 (UTC)