(If you want to see what this means in terms of acoustic measurements,here was a discussion of this on phonoloblog last summer (here and here), in which Bob Kennedy and I exchanged plots of our formant trajectories (time functions of resonance frequencies) in fife vs. five.)
This vowel quality distinction is generally not affected by flapping/voicing of /t/. As a result, in my own speech, the same quality difference that appears in write vs. ride also appears in writer vs. rider. As a result, whilelatter and ladder are homophones for me, writer and rider are definitely not. The original /t/ and /d/ are both neutralized to a voiced tap [ɾ], but the initital-syllable diphthongs are very different.
(This change in "long i" before voiceless consonants is sometimes called "Canadian raising", but a similar change is found in many U.S. dialects as well. Back in 1942, Martin Joos claimed that Ontario speakers divided into two groups, one of which maintained the vowel quality distinction in spite of flapping and voicing, while the other group didn't; however, I've never been able to find any speakers of his second type, who would raise the diphthong in write but not in writer.)"On Sunday 23 January 2011 09:06:34 tijlan wrote:It is. "or" or "awr" is the diphthong in "north" or "war", in that key, but to
> I agree with Timo that we want to avoid English-based representations
> of foreign sounds. Is using English respelling keys not confusing even
> among natives?
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Pronunciation_respelling_key
me they are different.
How would they respell "cire", "sur", "sœur", "sieur", and "sueur" so that the
> Here's a typical IPA-less, English-speaker-oriented beginner's guide
> to languages:
>
> http://wordsandphrases.wordpress.com/french-words-phrases/
>
> The French "salut" is taught as "sah-lew". An uninformed reader might
> learn it as two long vowels with an approximant [sɑ:'lju:], when the
> correct pronunciation has no long vowel and approximant, [sa.ly]
> (notice also that English is stress-timed while French is
> syllable-timed; there is no distinctive stress in French words).
> Fortunately, French has allophonic long vowels but don't phonemically
> distinguish them from the short vowels, so [u:] instead of [u] isn't
> much of a problem. However, it would be a trouble in languages that do
> make such a distinction, such as German, Finnish, Japanese, Arabic,
> and many others.
Francophone could tell what the Anglophone was saying?
Pierre
--
.i toljundi do .ibabo mi'afra tu'a do
.ibabo damba do .ibabo do jinga
.icu'u la ma'atman.
--
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