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From: wald@ford.uchicago.edu (Kevin Wald)
Subject: Re: Chain Shift (was Tendency of Inflections to Disappear)
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References: <4suk93$pob@carrera.intergate.bc.ca> <4tac7o$r22@thighmaster.admin.lsa.umich.edu> <rte-2607961224140001@135.25.40.118> <rdd-2607961343260001@dmn1-39.usa1.com>
Date: Fri, 26 Jul 1996 22:06:23 GMT
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In article <rdd-2607961343260001@dmn1-39.usa1.com>,
Aaron J. Dinkin <rdd@usa1.com> wrote:
>In article <rte-2607961224140001@135.25.40.118>, rte@elmo.lz.att.com
>(Ralph T. Edwards) wrote:
>
>> In article <4tac7o$r22@thighmaster.admin.lsa.umich.edu>,
>> jlawler@snoopy.ling.lsa.umich.edu (John Lawler) wrote:
>> > 
>> > >Is there also a /@:/ phoneme, or do "bird" and "bud" sound the same to
>> > >Americans?
>> 
>> No. Bird has an R colored vowel and bud doesn't (for rhotic AE).  The
>> pronunciation of bud is very similar to that of most british folk, but
>> there is no contrast between the two syllables of abut, so one symbol is
>> used.
>
>YES THERE IS!

In some dialects there is; in some (such as mine) there isn't.

>              I am an AE speaker and I have always been annoyed by the
>assertion that there is (for example) no contrast between the vowels of
>"abut", or, in general, that there is only one phoneme represented by the
>phones [@] (<u> in "circus") and [V"] (<u> in "tub").

Oddly enough, I have [@b@t] for "abut", [t@b] for "tub", but [sRki"s]
for "circus", where i" is IPA barred-i (a high central vowel, which
occurs in the adverb "just" if you pronounce it differently from the 
adjective "just"). I thus have no qualms about assigning the vowels of 
"abut", "tub" and "bud" ([b@d]) to one phoneme, in my dialect, but would
hesitate to do the same for my second "circus" vowel.

>                                                      My proof of the fact
>that [V"] is not an allophone for schwa is that if it were, "hurry"
>['hV"ri] would rhyme with "furry" /'f@ri/.

This doesn't follow. In my dialect, "hurry" and "furry" don't rhyme, but
that's because "hurry" is /h@ri/ (where I use /@/ to represent the phoneme
that for me occurs twice in "abut"), and "furry" is /fRi/ (where /R/ is
my "bird" vowel, an r-colored central vowel of some kind -- I can't tell
whether it's IPA schwa-with-a-hook or IPA reversed-epsilon-with-a-hook 
-- which is most certainly *not* [@] + [r]).   

>                                            From the obvious observation
>that the two words do not rhyme,

Well, obvious to you and to me -- it should be made clear, however, that in
some dialects they *do* rhyme.

>                                 it follows that there are two separate
>vowel phonemes at work. If I had to come up with a minimal pair, I could.

For unadorned /@/ and /V"/, or for what you describe as /@r/ and /V"r/
(which for me are /R/ and /@r/)?

Kevin Wald              |  Hwaet saegest thu, yrthlingc?
wald@math.uchicago.edu  |     -- AElfric, _Colloquium Martianum_
