Emergence of tone in 'non-tone' languages
- From: sanlosinst@xxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: 9 Jun 2005 08:08:09 -0700
Estuary English is a group of English lects in England, based on the
lower-class speech of London, spreading ever further from London with
each passing year. It carries a strong element of social semiotic as a
badge of lower-class status, but more than this it implies that the
speaker is a 'sharp' modern city person and not some backward yokel.
The vowel in _cart_, _mark_, _calm_, _lager_ is non-rhotic, low and
back, and has various lip-positions, sometimes rounded and sometimes
not. Many Estuary English speakers pronounce this vowel with a low tone
(in some speakers, mid falling to low); the more 'common' the speaker
wishes to appear, the more pronounced this low tone becomes.
The vowel in _mike_, _kite_, _lie_, _mice_ varies in pronunciation a
lot between speakers, but in some speakers it is identical with that in
_mark_ except for the absence of low tone.
Thus in some speakers, the only distintion in pronunciation in the
pairs _mike_:_mark_ and _kite_:_cart_ is low tone in the second member.
A southern French speaker, from the Narbonne area, once tried to tell
me how to pronounce _dessus_ and _dessous_ (I had always used [d@s'y]
and [d@s'u]). In her pronunciation, the vowels had very little
difference in quality (fully back _ou_ versus almost fully back _u_)
but there was a notable difference in tone in the stressed syllable:
_u_ was high and _ou_ was low.
Samuel
.
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