Talk:Phonemic differentiation/Archive 1

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POV removed?

  • It seems remarkable to me that this page was created with a POV check tag already attached, especially when there was no talk page to discuss what the POV problem is. I assume it had to do with the disagreement between prescriptive and descriptive linguists alluded to in the opening paragraphs. I've rewritten the opening to be more accurate: in fact, it is neither the case that mergers/splits are proposed by prescriptivists nor that they are contended by descriptivists. Prescriptivists will regard some mergers/splits as "correct" and others as "incorrect", depending on which variety of a language they are prescribing (RP prescriptivists, for example, will approve of the START-PALM merger but disapprove of the CURE-FORCE merger). Descriptivists who focus on the synchronic linguistics of a single variety won't worry about mergers and splits at all, because those are comparative/historical terms. --Angr 08:33, 4 Mar 2005 (UTC)
    • It won't seem remarkable when you look at Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Sirius-serious merger and see why this article was created. And from the above (I haven't looked at the actual edits yet.) what you're doing is exactly the sort of POV checking and fact checking that I asked for there, from Smerdis of Tlön and others (given their comments about the bias inherent in some of these mergers and about the suspect nature of their names), and why I tagged the article. Feel free to expand the Spanish section, and add sections about phonemic mergers and splits in other languages, too, if you can. Uncle G 11:27, 2005 Mar 4 (UTC)
    • I see that you've excised the prescriptivist/descriptivist information completely. I disagree. There's definitely a difference in how the two approach this topic, and the article should state that not all of these mergers and splits are agreed upon by everyone and that individual linguists' choices of "correct" language affects what list of mergers and splits they aver, instead of saying (as it currently stands) that these are, without qualification, the mergers and splits. The contents of the last two sentences of what you say above belong in the actual article. Uncle G 11:45, 2005 Mar 4 (UTC)
  • I didn't realize that Sirius-serious merger had been up for VFD until I clicked on it to see whether it redirected here or not. Anyway, I hope you're satisfied with the edits I've made so far, and I intend to go through the page and bring it up to par soon. It may take a while, though, because I'm trying to do the same thing with Regional accents of English speakers, which is a total mess, and somewhere in there I'm supposed have real work to do (i.e. the kind I get paid for). I don't know diddly about Spanish (except that "ll" and "y" merge in the south of Spain and Latin America), but I thought I might add something about mergers in German. I'm not sure what you mean by "not all of these mergers and splits are agreed upon by everyone". I don't think anyone would deny that the splits and mergers listed exist. It's just that some of the splits and mergers belong to varieties considered standard in their respective countries, and others don't. --Angr 11:55, 4 Mar 2005 (UTC)
    • I merely started things off. I did the merger, attempted to add some context, and asked for POV and fact checks. I'm very happy to see others taking up the reins and improving the article. It would be good if you did add things about mergers and splits in German, too. The context of having the languages side-by-side would illustrate the contrasts and similarities with English. And what I'm trying to say is that the article needs some indication of what you and I have both said, namely that a linguist's choice of "correct" accent — Received Pronunciation, General American, Scottish English, Indian English, or whatever — affects which of these mergers xe will aver and which xe will not, and descriptivists will be different yet further. Uncle G 12:21, 2005 Mar 4 (UTC)

poor-pour merger in the US

I am basing my information on The Pronunciation of English in the Atlantic States by Hans Kurath and Raven I. McDavid (University of Alabama Press and University of Michigan Press, 1961). According to this book (see especially Map 42), the poor-pour merger is found in SE New Hampshire and southern Maine, and south of the Mason-Dixon line, but not in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Vermont, Connecticut, Rhode Island, or most of Massachusetts. I have corrected the statement about the merger at Southern American English accordingly. I acknowledge that whether the merger is stigmatized or not is open to interpretation and so that statement can be left out. (But I still think it is stigmatized, and that pronunciations like "pore" or "po'" for "poor" are usually derided by speakers of General American.) --Angr 09:06, 7 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Kurath & McDavid's research, as you know, is more than 40 years ago. William Labov's recent work, I assure you, has found pore-poor merger to be the rule in the Mid-Atlantic cities (though he seems to have taken that particular chapter off his website). As for stigmatization - I don't think it's salient enough to be actively stigmatized. That is, you can write pore for poor as an "eye dialect" spelling, and the readers will go "Haw, haw, what a hick"; but I don't think this is something people actively notice in speech the way they notice a southern drawl or a New York coffee.

Since the chapter is gone from the website, and since the published book has been "to be published next year" for the last five years, I have no way of confirming it. I'll take your word for it that people in NYC and Philly say "pore" for "poor", though if I heard it I would still think "Haw, haw, what a hick" -- and for me (who grew up in Texas) to consider someone from NYC a hick requires an awfully high level of hickdom. Maybe it's only stigmatized in the South, as being too Southern-accenty? Anyway, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, I'll let it stand that the poor-pour merger is found in NYC and Philly as well, but I'm changing "standard dialects" to "accents", because the speech of NYC and Philly is neither standard nor dialect. --Angr 18:44, 7 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I don't know what you mean by "neither standard nor dialect". Of course it's a dialect (well, it's actually two dialects); any variety of a language is ipso facto a dialect. By "the standard dialects of New York and Philadelphia" I meant the dialects which are regarded as standard within New York and Philadelphia—the point being, this isn't a low-prestige feature in NY and Phila. AJD 23:42, 7 Mar 2005 (UTC)

P.S. I would definitely actively notice "pore" for "poor" in speech, at least in rhotic accents. I might not notice it in nonrhotic accents. I would notice it even more for "tour"; I suspect if someone (especially a rhotic American) told me he worked as a "tore guide" I might not even know what he meant for a few seconds. --Angr 18:57, 7 Mar 2005 (UTC)

More mergers

Dinosaur-For & Rite-Write Mergers

  • The dinosaur-for merger is a merger that causes for to rhyme with dinosaur that occurs in most accents of English. In the accents of English that have no merger, dinosaur and for don't rhyme.
  • Wr-cluster reduction is a merger by which the cluster [wr] (spelled wr) is simplified to [r];, making write and rite homophones. For the very few accents that don't have the merger rite is pronounced /raIt/ and write is pronounced /wraIt/.

Can you provide evidence (published, not anecdotal) that there are accents that do not have these mergers? --Angr 06:30, 9 Mar 2005 (UTC)

From-Rum Merger

This one has gone unmentioned. However, it is, perhaps, worth noting ... if it really exists. As far as I've been able to make out it affects the words from, what, was, of, want and possibly others. In North American accents these seem to be pronounced with the vowel in STRUT or at least this is what's suggest by things I've read. However the Cambridge Dictionary suggests otherwise saying that these are simply merged to the vowel in PSALM along with the other LOT words. What's going on?

- Jim 23Mar05

If I've learned one thing over the years, it's never trust what British authors have to say about American English. (The exception is John C. Wells, but even with him you have to be a little careful.) I don't know about want, but the others in your list certainly have the STRUT vowel when fully stressed. But it's not a merger; what's going on is that those words originally had the LOT vowel when stressed and schwa when unstressed, as they still do in RP. What happened in AmE is that the schwa was re-strengthened to STRUT when the words were stressed (in AmE the STRUT vowel is phonetically virtually identical to schwa), and the STRUT vowel replaced the LOT vowel. There may still be Americans who pronounce these words with LOT/PALM in stressed position, but I think it sounds old-fashioned and/or affected coming from an American. As for want, for me it definitely has LOT/PALM. I don't know if there are Americans who pronounce it with STRUT; if so, it's probably a regional thing (like the way Philadelphians pronounce water with FOOT). --Angr 08:06, 23 Mar 2005 (UTC)
In certain dialects of AmE the STRUT vowel is phonetically virtually identical to schwa, thank you very much. (I've heard plenty of speakers who put want in the same group as what, was, by the way.) AJD 15:54, 23 Mar 2005 (UTC)
The first person I ever heard say "want" as "wunt" is a professor from central North Carolina. This pronunciation may be common there, but it is (in my experience) uncommon elsewhere. For me, want has the lot vowel (well, OK, so want is /wa:nʔ/ and lot is /la:ʔ/), but palm is /pɔɫm/.  :-p Tomer TALK 05:45, Apr 22, 2005 (UTC)
UPDATE!!! Apparently he's not from NC, he's from southeastern Iowa! Tomer TALK 09:58, May 16, 2005 (UTC)

Hippie-hippy merger

  • The hippie-hippy merger is the merger of final unstressed /i/ and final unstressed /I/ that occurs in most accents of English as an effect of happy tensing. In accents that don't have the merger, hippie is pronounced /hIpi/ and hippy is pronounced /hIpI/. The merger is absent from many dialects of English English and from Scottish English where the final vowel in hippy is often realized as /e/.
It strikes me as unlikely that any accents make this distinction. Please provide a verifiable, published source describing accents in which hippie and hippy are a minimal pair; otherwise this information cannot be included. --Angr/comhrá 04:32, 4 May 2005 (UTC)

Tense-lax mergers

I'm a little worried about categorizing all the mergers before intervocalic r as "tense-lax" mergers. For one thing, merging "marry" and "merry" clearly isn't that, since both vowels are historically short/lax. And AFAIK there are accents that merge "marry" and "merry" but keep them distinct from "Mary". Also, it seems to be missing the point (which was missed before the rewrite too), which is that many American accents (mine included) have merged vowels before intervocalic r so that they perfectly match vowels before coda r:

  • "mirror" and "nearer" merge; they both have the vowel of "near"
  • "marry", "merry", "Mary" merge; they all have the vowel of "square"
  • "hurry" and "furry" merge; they both have the vowel of "nurse"
  • "sorry" and "sari" merge; they both have the vowel of "start"

--Angr 07:56, 9 Mar 2005 (UTC)

It's true that merging marry and merry but keeping both separate from Mary is not a case of tense-lax neutralization. But is that a widespread enough pattern to merit treatment in this article? (Honest question. I don't know of any major regional dialect which has merged marry and merry without Mary, though it's likely that there are individual speakers out there for whom this is true.) Sorry-sari isn't really a case of tense-lax neutralization either: that's a wholesale merger of "short o" with "broad a" (the bother-father merger) independent of whether or not it's followed by intervocalic r. In accents where sorry rhymes with story, sorry has undergone TLN.
I'm not sure that it's "the point" that in many accents the outcome of TLN mergers is identical to the tense vowel before coda r. It's certainly not true in all accents: for instance, in Philadelphia the merged merry-hurry-furry vowel is phonetically intermediate between "short e" and "short u", not a syllabic r. However, even if it's not "the point" I'll grant that it is interesting and relevant; so I'll add a remark to the section. AJD 08:12, 9 Mar 2005 (UTC)
This dialect map for marry-merry-mary does suggest some mergers are not regional. Joestynes 08:24, 9 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Oy vey. That map suggests that's virtually no regional difference in marry-merry-Mary at all, since there are dots of all colors in all regions of the country. At least I can take some solace in the knowledge that the survey relied on self-reporting, which can be pretty unreliable. Also, I don't know to what extent that survey factors out population mobility. AFAIK Labov's Telsur only used informants who were born and grew up in the city where they lived, and whose parents had been born and grew up there as well. But it is interesting that that map indicates it's fairly common to merge marry and Mary while keeping merry distinct, something the Merriam-Webster dictionary suggests is possible in its listed pronunciations but which I thought was a myth. --Angr 10:25, 9 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Labov's Telsur map for marry-merry-Mary shows significant numbers of respondents with the full three-way distinction pretty much only in the "Northeast Corridor" region between Boston and Washington. There are speakers with only partial merger scattered throughout the South. AJD 17:30, 9 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Glide cluster reduction

The article states /hw/ is reduced to /w/ when spelled <wh>. What about foreign words like Juan or Hwang Ho? Do speakers with the reduction say /w/ or /hw/ there? Joestynes 01:40, 22 Mar 2005 (UTC)

In my (purely anecdotal) experience, most people with the merger pronounce Juan with just /w/. Names like Hwang, with the hw actually spelled out, probably get /hw/ more often even from merged speakers. AJD 04:08, 22 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I agree. Certainly the San Joaquin Valley is usually pronounced [wɑˈkin]. I can't say I've ever heard anyone mention the Hwang Ho in conversation; for me it's one of those words you only ever see written. --Angr 06:26, 22 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Erm, isn't the IPA symbol for the sound represented by wh (in some dialects) [ʍ]? --/ɛvɪs/ 02:21, Apr 19, 2005 (UTC)

If you're doing a narrow phonetic transcription, and the sound is produced as a fricative (as opposed to a voiceless glide), yes. If you're doing a broad phonemic transcription, /hw/ is fine, since its distribution indicates that it is phonologically a cluster rather than a single segment. --Angr/comhrá 04:48, 19 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Ah. By the way, who does pronounce Hwang Ho as "Wang Ho"? I'm a "victim" of the w/wh merger (unlike many other people in the area) and I don't pronounce it that way. Does that pronunciation even exist? --/ɛvɪs/ 04:49, Apr 24, 2005 (UTC)
Huang Ho is not the kind of thing you hear in everyday conversation, and it's sufficiently alien-looking that everyone I've ever heard actually pronounce it, does so as it's spelled, i.e., with a [hw]. That said, the same people pronounce the last name Huang as though it were spelled Wong. All a matter of familiarity, I think.  :-) Tomer TALK 03:50, Apr 26, 2005 (UTC)

father-bother merger

The statement in the father-bother merger section that balm and bomb are pronounced homophonously, is incorrect. While this certainly the case with some speakers in the relevant areas, there are much better examples than balm and bomb. My observation (*gak* Original Research) is that there are areas where balm and bomb are homophonous, such as eastern Wisconsin, San Francisco, the Salt Lake City area, etc., but these are exceptions. Most speakers I've heard say the world "balm" (an admittedly rare word in the US, compared to "ointment") as /bɔ:m/, /bʌlm/, or /bʌɫm//bʌɨm/. (That's not really supposed to be an ɨ, but it's an L-colored retroflex semivowel glide, pronounced somewhat like an unrounded /w/...). "Bomb", on the other hand, is almost everywhere pronounced either /ba:m/ or /bɔ:m/. Even given the homophonous nature of the pronunciation /bɔ:m/, to characterize this vowel as /ɑ/ is inaccurate. Tomer TALK 05:25, Apr 22, 2005 (UTC)

I agree that balm is a rare word, prone to spelling pronunciation, that people are more likely to read than pronounce. On the other hand, In Life of Brian there's a joke about misunderstanding balm as bomb (even though the Brits do not have the father-bother merger), and I've been in church choirs where there was some snickering about Hizbollah being responsible for the "balm in Gilead". Finding homophones resulting from the father-bother merger is hard, since words on the father side of the equation are rare in nonrhotic accents. How about saying bomb rhymes with palm or calm? Bach/bock (for people who don't use /x/ in Bach)? Kahn/con? Mali/Molly? Drama rhyming with comma? Sonata form rhyming with It's not a form? --Angr/comhrá 06:02, 22 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Hmmm. Food for thought. My experience is admittedly almost exclusively with people who have at least graduated highschool, if not college or university. In the few cases that they didn't, it wasn't because of illiteracy. At least in Wisconsin, among this group (which represents the vast majority of the population), balm, calm and palm all have a distinct L-glide after either /a/ or /ɔ/. This may be a result of literacy breaking down a previously existing merger. I have heard the pronunciation /bam/ in Wisconsin, but only from an old farmer, talking about /ʌɾəɹ ba:m/. (I'm unhappy about having to use a schwa there...but I don't have time to go looking for a sibilant underdot...) Tomer TALK 06:52, Apr 22, 2005 (UTC)
I assume you mean the syllabicity mark (more a vertical stroke than a dot). It's at &#809;. But for the "r-colored schwa" of a word like udder you can also use ɚ, which is at &#602;. --Angr/comhrá 09:02, 22 Apr 2005 (UTC)
How about lager~logger? AJD 06:52, 22 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Might be problematic because for many people log (and therefore presumably logger) actually has the caught vowel, not the cot vowel. --Angr/comhrá 07:00, 22 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Oh no. That's definitely ['la:g əɹ] vs. ['lɔg əɹ] :-) On the other hand, Bach/bock, Kahn/con, Mali/Molly as homophones is indubitably quite widespread. Drama rhymes with comma, and Sonata form rhymes with Tsnáta form. (It's amazing how many people who when you put a word in front of them that is spelled with a word-initial "ts" will say they can't pronounce the ts together, but when they're talking, they do it all the time :=)) My favorite is "Wutz tzpos(t) be?"  :-p Tomer TALK 06:59, Apr 22, 2005 (UTC)

horse=hoarse

The article states:

In accents that have the merger horse and hoarse are both pronounced [hɔː(ɹ)s], ...

This assertion is not entirely incorrect. For starters, it completely ignores those speakers who say [haːɹs]. More relevantly, however, it reflects predominantly a Southern AmE pronunciation. Most native-speakers in the US esp. who speak northern midland and inland north, simply say [hors]. If reliance is being made upon a text for the hawrrss/hoss pronunciation, that text is incorrect. Tomer TALK 06:05, Apr 22, 2005 (UTC)

AFAIK, the people who say [hɑɹs] (i.e. who have the card-cord merger) say it only for horse, not for hoarse, so they don't have the horse-hoarse merger anyway. As for the quality of the vowel in different accents, it is probably neither cardinal o nor cardinal ɔ in most accents (including British and Australian accents, which also have the merger), but somewhere in between the two. So it's just a matter of convention which symbol you use to represent the vowel, and the convention that is nearly universal among linguists is to use [ɔɹ] for rhotic and [ɔː] for nonrhotic pronunciations of horse in accents without the card-cord merger, and to use the same symbols for hoarse in accents with the horse-hoarse merger. It's true that most Americans have a much higher vowel in ho(a)rse than in caught, but the convention is to transcribe them with the same symbol ɔ anyway. An unfortunate historical accident, perhaps, but to break with established lingusitic conventions on Wikipedia would require justification amounting to original research. --Angr/comhrá 06:22, 22 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Keep in mind the distinction between phonetic and phonemic transcription: a lot of people will conventionally use /ɔ/ to represent American unmerged caught but wouldn't use [ɔ] for it. AJD 06:52, 22 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Keep in mind the distinction between broad phonetic and narrow phonetic transcription. In extremely narrow transcription you might encounter something like [ɔ̞˖] for unmerged caught, but in broad transcription it would still be [ɔ]. --Angr/comhrá 07:07, 22 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Good points all. btw USER:Ajd, in case you're wondering...the "extra space" thing in the IPA (and unicode) templates is in the templates...as you'll notice, Angr and I are including the punctuation inside the template tags, since that stupid extra space doesn't show up because of the way the wikipedia parses whitespace. :-) Tomer TALK 08:47, Apr 22, 2005 (UTC)
I remember I saw the transcriptions /hoɹs/ for hoarse and /hɔɹs/ for horse (I guess it was an American transcription system that used /o/ for the vowel of toe). J. 'mach' wust 09:04, 22 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Yeah, that's the conventional way to transcribe those words for accents where horse and hoarse haven't merged. I think nonmerged hoarse would be transcribed [hoɹs] even when hoe is transcribed [hoʊ] since the transition to [ɹ] replaces the [ʊ] offglide. --Angr/comhrá 09:18, 22 Apr 2005 (UTC)

the Scouse article

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scouse

There's a cleanup notice on the Scouse article. Does it need any cleaning up? I think it does because for example it says, get becomes gerr, and it's not clear what gerr could possibly mean? Do they mean that it rhymes with burr or with the first syllable of terrible?

Glide cluster reduction

I've moved glide cluster reduction to it's own article because it was getting kind of long and taking up too much space in this article.

gh-dropping

Angr, you've probably got sources that discuss this in depth...chronologically, geographically, socially, etc. I'm wondering if you might also be able to find a source that discusses the use of -þ instead of -f, at least in the word "trough" in some dialects or idiolects. (That's actually how I grew up saying it, and didn't learn until later that the first phonetic entry in the dictionary is "trɔf" rather than "trɔθ"...) I'm curious about its development, especially since I've never heard of "cough" as "kɔθ". Tomer TALK 05:30, May 16, 2005 (UTC)

OED gives a quote from 1502 from someone called Arnolde where trough is spelled trouthe, so that's one clue as to how old the [θ] pronunciation is. Webster's Third New International gives the following pronunciations (adapted to IPA):
  • [trɔf]
  • sometimes [trɑf] (I don't know if that means only people with the cot-caught merger, or if there are non-cot-caught-merging people who pronounce it with [ɑ] as well)
  • chiefly by bakers [tro]
  • chiefly by British bakers [traʊ]
  • dialectal [-θ] or [-ft]
The only other word I know where gh is pronounced [θ] is Keighley. I actually have very little in the way of sources on the historical phonology of English in my library. I have A history of the English language by Albert C. Baugh and Thomas Cable (the latter of whom was my History of the English Language professor when I was an undergrad), but it covers mostly the history of the usage of English, with some discussion of lexicon, syntax, and morphology, but it has very little phonology in it. --Angr/comhrá 06:08, 16 May 2005 (UTC)

knot/not and nu/gnu merger(s)

First, I don't know that this really qualifies as a "merger". In English, as with most Germanic languages, dialect differences are characterized more by vowel changes than consonant changes, and I think the word "merger" reflects this phenomenon. Consonant cluster reduction, on the other hand, is a different animal entirely. I would characterize kn->n and gn->n as cluster reduction, not as mergers. Also, calling it a nu/gnu merger is ridiculous. "nu" is a Yiddish word, and it certainly didn't merge with gnu. "New", perhaps, in most AmE dialects is a more appropriate comparison, but shows the weakness of this whole argument, since new is [nu:] as opposed to the more common BrE [nju:] and eastern AmE local variant [niw]. Gnu, like nu, is a borrowing, and is, in fact, in my experience, far more often pronounced [gə 'nu:] or [gnu:] than as [nu:]. A more appropriate example would be "gnat", which many literate people hypercorrect (quite consciously, and with a touch of joviality) as [gnæ:t] rather than simply [næʔ]. The problem is that this clearly demonstrates that it is a cluster reduction, not a merger. The same people do not say ['mi æt] vs. [mi:t] for "meat" and "meet" (or "mete"), respectively. This may be due to the fact that there are a large number of people of Germanic and Slavic ancestry who live in this part of the US, for whom pronouncing kn- and gn- (and ts-, for that matter) is neither particularly difficult nor unusual. After all, when your last name is Hrdlika, you learn to deal with simple things like kn- quite easily.  ;-) (I honestly think that telemarketing firms make a grave error by hiring people from Tennessee and Georgia...People in Wisconsin know how to pronounce English last names, but also how to pronounce all manner of other last names as well. Hiring Wisconsinites would greatly reduce the number of people who are offended right-off-the-bat by the gross mispronunciation of their last names (or even first names)...My English name is Travis Krueger...which one buffoon managed to mangle into "Ternvas Kraljer" (!?)...) BUT I DIGRESS...I would like to propose changing the kn/gn "mergers" into "consonant cluster reductions", and discussing them in a separate section on consonant changes (along with -gh and glide-cluster reduction, l-syllabification, ng-coalescence, wr/r-reduction (again, not "merger), th-fronting, and possibly hew/yew merger (which is actually h-dropping))...in addition, I'd like to see some discussion about the cluster reduction of -nt- and -nd- to -nn- or -n- as well as of -st to -s(s). Tomer TALK 09:47, May 16, 2005 (UTC)

I definitely agree that a lot of the recently added mergers aren't mergers at all, and this page is not the place to list every single sound change that every single dialect or accent of English ever went through. I very much want to cull this page down to a list of changes where phoneme /A/ and phoneme /B/ merged into phoneme /A'/ or where phoneme /A/ split into phonemes /A'/ and /A"/. And I'd like to see the English section limited to English per se, since I strongly suspect that most of the mergers claimed to apply everywhere except "in some Scottish and Irish accents" are actually splits that happened in the development of Scots (and therefore are present in Ulster Scots as well), but not English. And I'm amazed at the audacity chutzpah of whoever is adding new sections with the {{Unsourcedsect}} tag already attached, as if to say, "I know perfectly well that what I'm adding is unverifiable." Over the next couple of days I'm going to add the sources for everything I can find sources for, and then I will delete everything else. --Angr/comhrá 12:22, 16 May 2005 (UTC)
P.S. I think a lot of the stuff here could be profitably merged with History of the English language or English pronunciation. --Angr/comhrá 15:15, 16 May 2005 (UTC)

Pin-pen merger

I'm moving this to it's own article, because it's getting kind of long.

Page length

This article is getting much too long: it really can't cover every minor sound change that's affected some dialect of English; it's just getting ridiculous. I'm inclined to just revert the whole batch of new "unsourced" sections added by anons last night, but I figured I should post here first. It seems to me that this article should be limited principally to sound changes that affect a large number of dialects and are well-known by linguists, and should list them under the names by which they're known to linguists. AJD 16:38, 22 May 2005 (UTC)

I'm inclined to agree with you. See my remarks above about what should and should not count as a phoneme split or merger. The only problem with your suggestion is the last sentence, because a lot of these aren't known by any specific name to linguists. I've tried to be consistent in using Wells's names for the mergers, but some of them (like caught-cot) are better known under different names than his, and others of them (like pin-pen) are well known under a name even though Wells doesn't have a name for it. (Wells discusses pin-pen in a section called simply "vowels before nasals".) So sometimes we have to be a bit creative with our naming. But otherwise, I agree. No more mergers that take place everywhere except some accents in Scotland and Ireland (especially since I suspect most of them are splits that happened in the history of Scots and so should be discussed at Scots language and Ulster Scots language). And no more adding anything without adding sources for it (again, as I mentioned above, it takes a lot of chutzpah to add {{Unsourcedsect}} to your own addition, as it says "I know this is unverifiable but I'm adding it anyway." --Angr/comhrá 16:57, 22 May 2005 (UTC)
P.S. It doesn't matter if you go through and change every "Scottish English and Hiberno-English" to "some varieties of British English" as someone has been doing lately; unsourced remains unsourced and will be deleted in a few days if no sources are forthcoming. --Angr/comhrá 05:14, 23 May 2005 (UTC)

Hew cluster reduction

Um. What is going on here? The hew/yew "merger" is nonexistant. It is covered amply by two other well-established phenomena: h-dropping and hypercorrection. In any case, what "cluster" is being reduced? Tomer TALK 19:07, May 22, 2005 (UTC)

I've got half a notion to remove that wikilink, and send the Hew cluster reduction article for VfD. See Talk:Hew cluster reduction for more of my rant. Tomer TALK 19:41, May 22, 2005 (UTC)

It's a real enough phenomenon that some people pronounce huge [judʒ] and human [jumən]. When I took freshman linguistics at UT in 1986 one of our assignments was to interview native Texans about their accent, and one of the questions had us elicit the word Houston from our informants to see if they say [hjustən] or [justən]. Considering these are accents where no one would ever "drop the h" of house or hundred, this doesn't fit in well with h-dropping unless that article is seriously rewritten. But I'm not sure that's such a bad idea; there's not reason h-dropping can't include the Middle English sound changes of /hl/>/l/, /hn/>/n/, and /hr/>/r/, as well as the modern changes of /hw/>/w/, /hj/>/j/ and canonical "Cockney" h-dropping. --Angr/comhrá 20:13, 22 May 2005 (UTC)
That would make much more sense to me. Of course, I don't have references to back me up, so all I do is rant on the sidelines. I wonder if perhaps the reduction of /hj/->/j/ is related to what we were discussing the other day, about the pronunciation /ju/ vs. /iw/, which, as such, would point probably to an early divergence between the two phonemes. Tomer TALK 21:15, May 22, 2005 (UTC)
I've merged Glide cluster reduction and Hew cluster reduction with H-cluster reductions.

Deletion of unsourced sections

I have now deleted all sections of "Phonemic differentiation in English" that had no sources. If any more additions are made without proper sourcing I'll delete those too. --Angr/탉 08:38, 26 May 2005 (UTC)

Forthwith, I hope. Tomer TALK 09:20, May 26, 2005 (UTC)
Actually I'll probably first slap an {{Unsourcedsect}} on it and then wait 24 hours before deleting. Otherwise it might look to much like I'm trying to "own" this page. --Angr/탉 09:28, 26 May 2005 (UTC)
Don't you? :-p Tomer TALK 17:56, May 26, 2005 (UTC)
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