Re: some more Irish vowels


John Atkinson wrote:
"Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote...

John Atkinson wrote:
<ranjit_mathews@xxxxxxxxx> wrote ...
John Atkinson wrote:
"Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@xxxxxxxxxxx> 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.

... and mine. Would you find anything wrong with calling it an [E:]
that's r-colored, the coloring being represented by a rhotic hook?

Definitely not "r-coloured", in the non-rhotic dialects I know of.
Some
SBrit varieties (e.g., in Wales) certainly have [E:], with no
offglide
at all. In most there's a centralising and somewhat more open
off-glide, in the direction of [@] or [V], but not closing in the
direction of [r] AFAICS. At least, no more than occurs at the end of
any other vowel followed by a syllable starting with /r/ (like the
short
vowels of spirit, ferry, carry, sorry, hurry, and the long ones of
tarry, story, jury, furry, beery, firey, and no doubt one or two
others). There's no rationale for calling this r-coloured any more
than
calling the same vowels l-coloured or n-coloured when followed by
syllables starting with these sounds.

You're talking about realizations of the Mary phoneme

Yes

(or morphophone,
for those who merge two or three of the vowels in question),

AFAIK, mary/merry/marry are never merged by speakers of non-rhotic
SBrit. Ranjit was asking for my opinion about the pronunciation of
non-rhotic SBrit (which includes his accent and mine), and I was
answering his question.

South Indian English and your Australian English accents count as
SBrit?

not about the phonetics of the token in question.

McCormack's "yearning"? No, I haven't heard it, and I don't know what
his local dialect is, so of course I've expressed no opinion about it
anywhere in this thread, as you may have noticed.

So I could repeat Ruud's & Ekkehard's complaint about not clicking the
link to the sound file ...

In an attempt to work out what you're getting at, I just consulted
Wells

For the GenAm
minority who distinguish <Mary> from both <merry> and <marry>,
<Mary>
must be must be regarded phonologically as as /meIri/, with the
FACE
vowel, whatever its realization (usually [e] or [e@] )."

Is this right? If not, is it wrong/incomplete/just plain sloppy?

Incomplete, it seems. The "vowel" is *r-colored* (by its
juxtaposition
with a bunched r; it's not the same as the diphthong in failing).

Does it start off like [E] (as in SBrit) or [e] (as in Scottish
English,
and as Wells says)?

No, neither of the above -- it can be indefinitely extended without
confusion with the other two.

Which "other two"? The DRESS and FACE vowels in your reference
dialect? Or SBrit Mary and ScEng Mary?

marry and merry

You're saying that, unlike most SBrit realizations, your Mary has a pure
vowel with no offglide (so that it makes sense to talk of indefinitely
extending it)? Great, now I'm beginning to learn something.

Of course, in SBrit, whether or not Mary has an off-glide, the main
feature distinguishing it from merry is that the Mary vowel is long,
while the merry vowel is short -- so the longer Mary is extended, the
_less_ the likelyhood of confusion! Am I right in assuming that in your
reference dialect, the vowels in merry and Mary are the same length, and
that they're distinguished by something else? And not simply degree of
openness either, which would be too simple, no?

It is not without reason that British phoneticians focus on vowel
length and American phoneticians on vowel quality. Am V length is
totally predictable and thus negligible; apparently Br V length is more
significant than quality.

.

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