Re: some more Irish vowels


"António Marques" <m.ap@xxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:457fdbc6$0$15443$88260bb3@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
John Atkinson wrote:

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

Phonetically, it certainly is, in my dialect. Likewise in RP, and, as
far as I know, other non-rhotic southern Brit. I assume you're not
referring to these, though, but to your own variety, which, you seem to
be implying, is "standard" in the sense that anyone who doesn't know
what you mean can't speak English.

I think y'all are being obtuse on purpose, this time. Peter has - I
think - explained 'Mary' is the name (he | the people involved in such
discussions) give to the reasonably small vowel space used to realise
that phoneme in a majority of the AmE dialects that distinguish it.
Moreover, the label 'Mary' is used because no other unambiguous way of
referring to it has been devised. If anyone else's vowel in the word
'Mary' can be adequately described by other means (cf. 'merry with a
centralizing glide') then ipso facto the discussion isn't about it.

Originally, he had said the irish 'yearning' had that same (Peter's
'Mary') vowel. No discussion of phonemes intended. If at some time that
wasn't clear, he explained it afterwards.

In case anyone wonders why I got to write the above, it's a possibly
vain attempt to avoid yet another unending thread with people talking at
cross-purposes.

I appreciate your effort to clear things up for us, António. I can assure
you that I'm not being deliberately obtuse. Let me try to sum up the
problem.
I'll start with the recording I linked to, which may or may not be the one
Peter first commented on: Phonetically speaking, McCormack uses the same
vowel in "glen" and "yearning"; if anything, "yearning" is marginally lower.
Both vowels are pure monophthongs. Both "glen" and "yearn" contain the
"merry" vowel phoneme in many varieties of Irish English, while "Mary" would
have the "face" vowel.
As for the exact quality of the "Mary" vowel: American speakers who
differentiate between "Mary" and "merry" use the higher vowel in "Mary", not
in "merry", as Brian has pointed out and as John's quotation from "Accents
of English" confirms. Another possible difference between the two is the
presence of a schwa offglide in "Mary". However, McCormack's "yearning" is
[jE::rnIN].
What follows from the above is that there's no plausible sense in which the
statement "'glen' has 'merry', 'yearning' has 'Mary'" can be true. If I've
overlooked something important, please let me know.

Regards,
Ekkehard


.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: some more Irish vowels
    ... Phonetically, it certainly is, in my dialect. ... I assume you're not referring to these, though, but to your own variety, which, you seem to be implying, is "standard" in the sense that anyone who doesn't know what you mean can't speak English. ... If anyone else's vowel in the word 'Mary' can be adequately described by other means (cf. 'merry with a centralizing glide') then ipso facto the discussion isn't about it. ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: Im finally asking (re French)
    ... explicitly aware of the glide that distinguishes our vowel from the ... commonly understood convention? ... not as a vowel followed by an aspiration. ... And what you need is just an understandable single sound of e in best, ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: NYT: As Opera Audience Shrinks, the Met Gets Daring
    ... I moved to Chicago and discovered that people actually do say it. ... Northern Cities dialect? ... There's no "Northern Cities Dialect"; ... inhabitants) lie in the low-front vowel phonology (New York pronounces ...
    (rec.music.classical)
  • Re: some more Irish vowels
    ... Phonetically, it certainly is, in my dialect. ... SBrit varieties certainly have, with no ... vowel with no offglide (so that it makes sense to talk of indefinitely ... It is not without reason that British phoneticians focus on vowel ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: ASCII IPA vowels [was: Re: The last word on cot/caught]
    ... dialect. ... (but Bob Cunningham has shown in formant analysis that my "court" vowel ... /A./ cot, bother ... I have heard this in various accents, ...
    (alt.usage.english)