Re: "I'm coffee and he's espresso." -- facially nonsensical

From: Brian M. Scott (b.scott_at_csuohio.edu)
Date: 06/24/04 

Date: Thu, 24 Jun 2004 14:32:22 -0400

On Wed, 23 Jun 2004 23:53:02 -0700 Evan Kirshenbaum
<kirshenbaum@hpl.hp.com> wrote in
<news:smclphv5.fsf@hpl.hp.com> in
sci.lang,alt.usage.english:

> "Aaron J. Dinkin" <dinkin@babel.ling.upenn.edu> writes:

>> At any rate, the mergerers I've heard have, in my opinion, something that
>> sounds like my "Mary" vowel in their merger. Furthermore, the random
>> Michigan speaker I pulled up out of Bill Labov's Telsur study data has a
>> vowel in his merger that resembles (his own) /eh/ and (significantly
>> raised and fronted) /&/ more closely than /e/.

>> Also, I bet (perhaps without a whole lot of empirical justification) that
>> such speakers, when asked point-blank, would say that they have the same
>> vowel in "Mary" as in "mare";

> I'm having trouble following which level you're arguing at here. I
> suspect that if you actually ask one of us, the answer will be that
> *phonemically*, the vowel in "Mary" and "mare" is the same one as in
> "mat", and not the one in "met" or "mate". Whatever it most closely
> resembles phonetically.

In this case I see no real justification for distinguishing
the two, and phonetically I don't think that <Mary> and
<mare> have (in my original lect) the same vowel: they have
[E] and [E:], resp. They also don't go together
historically: <mare> is from OE <mere> (Angl.), <miere>
(WSax) and does not have the <mat> vowel phonetically or
historically.

Brian

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