----- Original Message -----
From: "wtsdv" <liberty@...>
To: <phoNet@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Saturday, June 07, 2003 8:01 PM
Subject: [phoNet] Abstractness (Was Re: [j] v. [i])


> Thank you. There's a lot here for me to think about, but I do want to
answer now those parts that I can answer now to get them out of the way.

> --- In phoNet@yahoogroups.com, "Richard Wordingham"
<richard.wordingham@n...> wrote:
>
> Incidentally, whoever called [&] an 'undisputed allophone of /V/'
was
> being provocative. It is disputed for 'Received Pronunciation'
(RP), near =
>
> minimal pairs of /&/ v. /V/ being 'oppose' v. 'uphold' and 'gallop'
> v. 'hiccup'. My source for these pairs is 'Phonetics' by J. D.
O'Connor
> (Penguin Books, 1973). He admits that they are allophones in
> American English.

>In normal fast speech I pronounce 'uphold' [&phold], 'gallop'
> [gæl&p], but 'hiccup' I do pronounce as [hIkVp]. The only
> explanation I can give is maybe there is secondary stress
> on the /V/. The reason I called them undisputed is I could
> think of no instance of unstressed /V/ or stressed /&/,
> at least not until you gave me the hiccups!

What evidence is there for there being a secondary stress in 'hiccup'? I
suspect it lies entirely in the vowel being unslurred. I fear there may be
no clear answer. 'Aztec' is a similar word, also notorious for its lack of
voicing assimilation. In 'gymnast', I had no hesitation in accepting the
existence of a secondary stress.

> I also enter æ with ALT 0230, but
Ossetian friends tell me that it doesn't show up correctly
in e-mail. I'm not sure why, it seems to work in my posts
to cybalist, although maybe it's not showing correctly in
people's individual deliveries.

I wonder if it's an issue of which 8-bit encoding around. I cut and paste
Romanian s cedilla (which we ended up writing '$') from Word into replies,
because it was not available via numlock/alt/... only to see it corrupted in
postings. I wonder if they are using codes with the high bit set for
Cyrillic. I must say that using /{/ instead of /æ/ will quickly make
postings incomprehensible.

Richard.