Re: Your first "linguistic" memory


"Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote...

> Ruud Harmsen wrote:
>>
>> "Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>: in sci.lang:
>>
>> >> >"Father" has as long a vowel as "farther"?
>> >>
>> >> In non-rhotic English, yes. Why would they be different?
>> >
>> >Because non-rhotic accents usually lengthen the vowel when they omit the
>> >following r. I imagine they started out with the same underlying vocalic
>> >phoneme.
>>
>> Yes, but the a in father, cast, last, fast, dance, etc. in non-rhotic
>> (Brittisch/Australian/New-Zealand) English

[Minor quibble: <dance> is /d&ns/ for most Australians]

>> is already intrinsically
>> long, viz. [A:]. It may not be /A:/, it don't know that, but it
>> certainly is [A:]. So no lengtening takes place due to /r/ being
>> [empty], because the vowel is already long, and there is no place for
>> superlong vowels in the system.
>
> Not in the system, of course (only in the Estonian system), but why not
> phonetically?

Eh? You're saying that both words have the same phoneme /A:/, but they may
be different at the allophonic level, is that it? If there's no phonemic
distinction in the vowel, and there's nothing different about the rest of
each word, what is there to induce different allophones?

John.


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