--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "P&G" <petegray@...> wrote:
> >how many vowels English language has?
>
> Depends on
> (a) the dialect
> (b) the speaker
> (c) the way you analyse them: e.g. do you count triphthongs
in "fire" etc as one vowel, or two?
>
> I distinguish 22 vowels in my speech:
which appears to RP with the 3-way merger of 'paw', 'pour'
and 'poor', the same system as my normal speech. However:
> bad bed bid bod bud book bed[azzle]
For me, 'bedazzle' has the same first vowel as 'bid'. I would
substitute 'cupboard', /kVb&d/.
> bard bird bead bored booed
> bade bide buoyed
i.e. 'bade' rhyming with 'made', not the synonymous 'bade' rhyming
with 'mad' that I use.
> bough bode
> bared beared pure
Typo! I'm sure 'beard' was meant.
'Pure' is an interesting one. I presume this is /pju@/. Before I
went to University I pronounced this as /pju:@/; now I pronounce it
as /pj3:/. It was the rods in 'ure' that changed - 'skewer'
and 'skua' remain /skjU@/. At some level, /jU@/ was a triphthong in
my speech, parallel to /ai@/ and /au@/, weakly contrasting with the
sequences of diphthong plus schwa, e.g. 'liar' v. 'lyre', 'queuer'
v. 'cure'. It's the morphemic structure that makes them different;
I'm not usre there's any audbile difference. (Scots are reported to
pronounce 'teas' and 'tease' differently, the morpheme boundary
in 'teas' affecting its pronunciation.)
> byre bower
>
> That is to say,
> 6 short vowels + schwa / A E I O V U &/
> 5 long vowels /a: 3: i: o: u:/
I think the symbols /A/ and /a/ are the wrong way round - I'm sure
the short vowel is near /æ/ (in IPA. 'a' with a tail), and the long
vowel would be written without a tail. There's a good IPA symbol
chart at <
http://www.i-foo.com/~kturtle/misc/xsamchart.gif>.
> 8 diphtongs /eI aI oI aU oU E@ i@ u@/
> 2 triphthongs /aI@ aU@/
>
> Rhotic dialects would not have triphthongs.
> Some of the vowels I distinguish are not distinguish in other
dialects.
> Some dialects have monophthongised my diphthongs (e.g. "spire"
as /spa:/)
Normally, and in my childhood speech (c. 9), /spæ:/, whereas /au@/
does monophthongise to /a:/. I have had to decipher an e-mail in
which 'our' was consistently misspelt 'are'.
And we still don't know whether Peter says 'grass' as /grAs/
or /gra:s/ in his notation, or for that matter, 'cross' and 'salt'.
> For what it's worth, I distinguish 27 consonants.
I'm curious. You need at least 24 for English. What are the
others? I'd guess /W/ (also analysed as /hw/, and reduced to /w/ by
many speakers), /ç/ (usually analysed as /hj/), but the 27th could
be /ñ/ (a rare alternative to /nj/) or /x/ (restricted to loan
words, but possibly a final allophone of /k/ in some dialects).
>
> Peter