Re: This week on Dancing with the Stars Re: The Business Memoir - the ``whom'' question

28 Oct 2006 10:46:35 -0700: "Peter T. Daniels"
<grammatim@xxxxxxxxxxx>: in sci.lang:

Ruud Harmsen wrote:
Meanwhile, returning to the issue at hand, I looked it up in Daniel
Jones 1956, "The pronunciation of English", par. 91 and 92., page 36.

That is a half-century old edition of a 1950 original, describing
speech of generations ago.

Yes. And changes do occur, but rather slowly. I've seen 17-something
discussions or Portuguese orthography and pronunciation (often not
properly separated, unfortunately) with accurate and detailed
descriptions of things still observable in present day European
Portuguese, like how [a] sometimes does occur in non-stressed
syllables.

What I have is Outline of English Phonetics, 9th ed. 1964, first
published 1918 (directed at the foreign learner; it does not deal with
dialects), and its secs. 276-83, on <&>, are an elaboration of what you
quote below. He does not admit <a> as a symbol for a sound of English
at all (except as the start of the diphthong <ai>. Thus anything he has
to say about this region of the vowel space is utterly irrelevant to
the present discussion.

Yeah, right. Still the fact is that the cat vowel is not fully open,
not in Southern England and not in America. The father vowel is,
though. But it's not usually front, except sometimes in Australia.

Because of their date, neither of Jones's works is of much value for
the description of contemporary English.

As I said, changes take place, but slowly.

--
Ruud Harmsen - http://rudhar.com
.

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