Re: Asian migration to Scandinavia

On 2008-09-16 23:52, Rick McCallister wrote:

> In the last three, I use 3 diferent vowels:
>
> heRiy (rhymes with "hairy"),
>
> kwoRL,
>
> baRow
>
> Some East Coast US accents distinguish Harry and Hairy as /haeRi/ vs. /heRi/

The merger of the MARY, MERRY and MARRY lexical sets (regularly
distinguished e.g. in RP and Scottish English) is a fairly recent
dialectal phenomenon (of course almost general in the Englishes of North
America). The falling together of EModE /a/ in <quarrel> with the vowel
of LOT is due to the rounding/retracting influence of the preceding /w/,
as in <war, warm> etc.

Piotr