Re: Changes in pronunciation before 'l' in English

From: Mxsmanic (mxsmanic_at_hotmail.com)
Date: 07/28/04 

Date: Wed, 28 Jul 2004 20:30:27 +0200

Greg Lee writes:

> According to descriptions I've seen, 'l' after the vowel of a syllable
> is velarized. I think it's actually uvularized, at least in my speech.
> At any rate, the dark 'l' does indeed color the preceding vowel. The
> 'l' may lose its alveolar articulation and become a uvular glide,
> and then the diphthong formed by the vowel + glide combination
> can monophthongize to a simple, rather hard to describe and
> somewhat disgusting, single vowel. In my speech, 'milk' has
> a diphthong and 'bulk' a simple vowel.

I don't seem to actually hear an 'l' in my speech, but the vowel seems
to change. There's a spectrogram created by that nifty SFS program at

http://www.mxsmanic.com/walk.jpg

I hear and see a tiny difference between "talk" and "tock," and between
"walk" and "wok," but I don't know if it's significant or exactly what
it means. I suppose it means a different vowel? The vowel in talk
seems to be closer to 'o' than the vowel in tock. 

-- 
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