Re: alternative pronunciations of 'naive'

In article
<872a455f-4df3-40ad-a7f4-c6075ea17bcb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
"Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Jan 28, 2:31 pm, Nathan Sanders <nsand...@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
In article <5hz9px49c6mx$.194hn2knae153$....@xxxxxxxxxx>,
 "Brian M. Scott" <b.sc...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Mon, 28 Jan 2008 00:26:49 -0500, Nathan Sanders
<nsand...@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in sci.lang:

They list two pronunciations that, following their
transcription, come out roughly as [nA.iv] and [naI.iv].
I don't think I've ever heard a native speaker (of
English!) use the former, but then again, the difference
is so subtle that I'm not sure I'd notice if I weren't
specifically listening for it.

I don't think that I've ever heard a native speaker of
English say anything but [nA'i:v] or similar.

That pronunciation just sounds odd to me, like a London chav saying
"not Eve".  

Only if you interpret the IPA stress mark as a glottal!

My default pronunciation of a low and high vowel next to each other
includes a glottal stop, if I force myself not to pronounce a
transitional vocoid between them. It takes significant effort on my
part not to do *something* to break up the vowel hiatus, and I don't
count significant effort for the purposes of determining my usual
pronunciation.

But my main issue with their first listed pronunciation was with the
quality of the first vowel, back [A] versus central [a]. As Brain
clarified, for him, the first vowel in "naive" is not the same as the
vowel in "mop", but M-W has the same symbol for both (at least for
their first transcription; their second transcription---the one I
agree with---uses the vowel in "ice").

I definitely have a central, not back, vowel in the first
syllable, and a very glide-like transition between the two syllables,
more like [najiv].

As with Brian, the [j] transition seems unlikely to me. Maybe because
it seems so French because of the dieresis.

I don't have a full glide there, but I definitely have some sort of
vocoid in between [a] and [i]. It's probably just [naIiv], which is
what would be expected from M-W's second transcription.

Nathan

--
Nathan Sanders
Linguistics Program
Williams College
http://wso.williams.edu/~nsanders/
.

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