Friday, March 21, 2008
I'm such a geek.
You know that you've been spending too much time surfing Wikipedia when you know that the every-day pronunciation of "writer" and "rider" are distinguished only by the consonants by British English speakers, distinguished only by the vowels by (many) Canadian English speakers, and not distinguished at all by most American English speakers. The writer/rider vowel distinction and house/houses vowel distinction in Canada are a result of "Canadian raising." This confirms my discovery during my 1999 travels that the distinctly Canadian pronunciation occurs when the following consonant is unvoiced.
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3 comments:
That's fascinating!
Clearly I've been Wikipediaing (Wikipediing?) the wrong stuff. :)
The vowel-flexibility of English is really interesting to me; especially since Japanese is so utterly inflexible; there are exactly five vowel sounds and they never vary by dialect or by context.
Indeed, where Japanese vowels are discrete, English (esp Canadian English apparently) vowels are continuous. We have a continuum for short a sound from "bet" through "bat" all the way to "bot".
I agree, really interesting! We've been watching some old south park episodes recently and it's nice to read a good explanation on "aboot".
The Danes have three extra vowels, å,ø, and æ - just to complicate matters.
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