From: Andrew Jarrette
Message: 58586
Date: 2008-05-18
At 2:57:41 PM on Saturday, May 17, 2008, Andrew Jarrette
wrote:
> Andrew Jarrette <anjarrette@... ca> wrote:
>> Not to mention, in Southwest and Midland dialects,
>> y: y
>> ø: ø
>> :
-------------If you reexamine my postings, nowhere did I posit a short phoneme //. I only posited short and long /y/ and /ø/ (at the same heights as short and long /i/ and /e/) plus a possible long-only /:/ (at the same height as /E:/ and /O:/). The latter, if it did exist, would have been the outcome of /ø/ after the operation of OSL (like similar /E:/ and /O:/ from /e/ and /o/ with OSL) as I proposed in my last post. Of course, it is probable that short /e/ /o/ and /ø/ were actually realized as [E], [O], [], so after OSL went through one could represent the SW ME vowel system as:
/i/ /i:/ /y/ /y:/ /u/ /u:/
/e:/ /ø:/ /o:/
/E/ /E:/ // /:/ /O/ /O:/
/a/ /a:/
again assuming that /:/ existed, which it may not have.Not the East Midlands: it went with the North and had the
unrounded vowels. And only two sets, I think, one high and
one mid. Oversimplifying a bit:
North & SW &
OE East Midl. SW Midl. SE
------------ --------- --------
y: i: y: e:
y i y e
e:o e: ø: e:
eo e ø e
__________
I find your "oversimplification" a bit difficult to read. It suggests that the North had rounded front vowels in ME ("North & SW", placed first in the row), if the last three in each row are OE East Midl. followed by SW Midl. followed by SE; if the first in each row is North, the second SW, then it suggests that North had rounded front vowels, SW had unrounded front vowels, and then I can't make sense of the conglomeration "& OE East Midl. SW Midl. SE" especially since there are only two more in each row of vowels, not three as the title suggests. Perhaps you could oversimplify your oversimplification.
Andrew