Re: Warter, warter everywhere

Bart Mathias wrote:

Mike Wright wrote:

I had four friends say "water", and here are the results:

Two had /wart@r/ (or however that should be transcribed). One is from New York, by way of North Carolina. I'd say that he has a New York accent of some kind. The other, his girlfriend, is from Texas and has a fairly strong Texas accent.

The other two, like me, had /wat@r/. [...]

Did they really have two different sounds after the /t/, or is /@r/ a digraph for a single phoneme?

I don't have any idea what the phonemes of English are. I should have just written something like "warter" and "wahter".

To put it another way, if /@/ is to be established as a phoneme there, doesn't it have to contrast with some other phoneme in the same environment?

(I confess that I worry that my query might result from incipient Alzheimers.)

Yeah, I'm hoping that my memory problems are just due to random neurons being killed by ambient radiation or automobile emissions.

--
Mike Wright
http://www.raccoonbend.com
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Warter, warter everywhere
    ... I'd say that he has a New York accent of some kind. ... The other, his girlfriend, is from Texas and has a fairly strong Texas accent. ... To put it another way, if /@/ is to be established as a phoneme there, doesn't it have to contrast with some other phoneme in the same environment? ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: Warter, warter everywhere
    ... Mike Wright wrote: ... New York, by way of North Carolina. ... fairly strong Texas accent. ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Warter, warter everywhere
    ... I had four friends say "water", ... I'd say that he has a New York accent of some kind. ... The other, his girlfriend, is from Texas and has a fairly strong Texas accent. ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: Warter, warter everywhere
    ... Mike Wright wrote: ... New York, by way of North Carolina. ... fairly strong Texas accent. ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: Warter, warter everywhere
    ... Peter T. Daniels wrote: ... New York, by way of North Carolina. ... fairly strong Texas accent. ...
    (sci.lang)
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