Re: some more Irish vowels


Ekkehard Dengler wrote:
"Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1165933347.349516.168000@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Ekkehard Dengler wrote:

The exact meaning of "the 'Mary' vowel" obviously depends on which
variety
of English you're talking about.

No, in the context of these newsgroups (not that I crossposted to aue),
Mary is a label for a certain quality of vowel, for which there may or
may not be a "cardinal number" or an "IPA transcription" (for which I
have asked many, many times, and no one has ever provided one).

The following excerpt from the AUE FAQ does provide an IPA transcription of
sorts. It also implies that "Mary" couldn't sensibly be used to describe a
particular vowel quality, the reason being that the pronunciation of the
name varies considerably between accents:

"Where there are two columns, the left column shows British Received
Pronunciation (RP), and the right column shows a rhotic pronunciation used
by at least some U.S. speakers.

(...)

[E] = [<epsilon>] as in:
'end' /End/ /End/
'get' /gEt/ /gEt/
'Mary' /'mE@rI/ /mE@ri/
'merry' /'mErI/ /'mEri/

Some U.S. speakers do not distinguish between 'Mary',
'merry', and 'marry'."

If "Mary" stood for a particular vowel quality rather than for (a vowel
phoneme in) a set of words, the last sentence would be nonsensical.

Perhaps that table was designed by Bob Cunningham or Ruud Haarmsen, as
it indicates phonemes but perhaps intends a phonetic transcription.

Phonetically, Mary is most certainly not merry with a centralizing
glide.

.

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