This article has not yet been rated on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Is this what's happening to my "hundred", "pretended", "cases", etc.? Jimp 4Oct05
I'm from Sydney, Australia. I do rhyme abbot and rabit and my pretended is /prətendəd/. Jimp 19Dec05
I don't know what the article means by "While there are some dialects that have a variable distinction, there are very few dialects that maintain a complete distinction."-- JHJ 16:27, 4 October 2005 (UTC)
I've changed the last two paragraphs:
into one much shorter one:
New Zealand English does not have a kit-bit split, so a discussion of what happens in New Zealand English isn't really relevant. With those two paragraphs, the article is one-third about the kit-bit split and two-thirds about some different phenomenon that only involves the same phoneme and a similar realisation of it. It also seems a bit odd having so much discussion about perceptions of Australians' and New Zealanders' language use (and what they do) in an article about a phenomenon limited to South African English.
— Felix the Cassowary ( ɑe hɪː jɐ) 03:57, 19 December 2005 (UTC)
What is the trigger condition for the Lennon-Lenin merger? Linguofreak 23:37, 18 March 2006 (UTC)
I spoke with some people from Arkansas and they seemed to change /ɛ/ to a diphthong /ɛɪ/. For instance, he said 'spent' as /spɛɪnt/. Is there any source that has noted this? Cameron Nedland 20:12, 6 May 2007 (UTC)
I and most people I speak with distinguish pen and pin, and I am a native Texan. The sentence saying that it has merged through all of Texas is unsourced and invalid, so I have changed it. LokiClock ( talk) 21:24, 23 August 2008 (UTC)
I second the above statement. I was born and raised in Texas, and I distinguish pen and pin, along with nearly everyone else I know. However, older members of my family from more rural parts of Texas do not distinguish between the two words, so from what I can see the merger applies only to rural and older speakers, so saying it is completely merged for most speakers is completely wrong. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 173.173.94.80 ( talk) 00:45, 30 June 2011 (UTC)
The kit-bit split is a split of EME /ɪ/ found in South African English [...]
What is meant by "EME" here? -- Picapica 12:17, 22 May 2007 (UTC)
I don't think I'm unusual in lowering /ɛ/ to /e/ before g (as in beg, egg.) Is there a name for this phenomenon? What is its geographical distribution? (I'm from California.) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.167.203.61 ( talk) 00:05, 5 January 2008 (UTC)
My ears and memory tell me that the pin-pen merger is very widespread in the United States. This article makes it seems as if few places outside of the South have this merger. That really doesn't seem to be the case. Turn on the TV sometime and you will hear many non-Southern people with this merger. Pronouncing pen with /ɛ/ sounds affected and pretentious (not to mention strange) to my ears, and I'm sure it sounds that way for many other Americans as well. As of now, there is no comprehensive guide to American English, so I figure my guess is as good as anyone's. I am not from the South, by the way. 208.104.45.20 ( talk) 05:13, 27 April 2008 (UTC)
Just so that you know, I have been watching a lot of American television, and I can guarantee that many Americans DO in fact have idea-smoothing in their speech. The first and last episodes of Deep Space Nine have Odo (Rene Auberjonois or whatever) and Jake Sisko (Cirroc Lofton) respectively, both saying "idea" with /I@/ at the end, not /i:@/. Jonathan Kent (John Schneider) in Smallville also says it the same way.
I don't know how to cite a television programme as a source, but there you go. If anyone else sees a programme with idea-smoothing in it, American or not, it might be worth mentioning it here, just so that people know it most certainly DOES exist in American English and many other forms of English. Avengah ( talk) 02:48, 29 April 2008 (UTC)
Also? "Idea smoothing", like almost all of the section headings in this article except "pin-pen merger", and some of the section headings in Phonological history of English low back vowels, is a neologism. The name "idea-smoothing" appears to have been invented for this article; I don't believe it's used by linguists. Likewise "met-mat merger", "lot-cloth split", and so on. AJD ( talk) 21:16, 29 April 2008 (UTC)
I've got another one. Chakotay (Robert Beltram) in Voyager, Season 1 episode 7 "Eye of the Needle", at 5 minutes in. Clearly /I@/. Avengah ( talk) 07:55, 7 May 2008 (UTC)
The article seems pretty clear about the distinction and merger of ee and ea. But what it's not clear at all about is the status of long e, for example in the word mete. In non-merging accents, is mete pronounced like meet or meat? I know that, for long o, bone and moan had the same vowel in Early Modern English, but whether long e was the same as ee or ea in Early Modern English is not made clear. - Gilgamesh ( talk) 07:12, 24 February 2009 (UTC)
I still want to know. - Gilgamesh ( talk) 01:06, 14 August 2011 (UTC)
We still need more information on the third lexical set described for Yorkshire dialects; the text as written is extremely unclear about it.
“The words team and cream, which have /ɪə/ in the traditional Yorkshire accents, have original long vowels, going back to Old English tēam and Old French creme respectively, while eat (< OE etan) and meat (< OE mete) have vowels that were originally short but lengthened by Middle English open syllable lenthening. This is the origin of the Yorkshire distinction. In accents with the distinction, the vowel /ɪə/ is usually represented by the spellings ea and eCe, as in neat and complete, and the vowel /ɛɪ/ is usually represented by the spellings ei and ey, as in receive and key, and the vowel /iː/ is usually represented by the spellings ee, ie and iCe as in feet, thief and suite, as well as plain e in the monosyllabic words be, he, me, she, the (when stressed), we and ye.”
This isn’t a two-way, but a three-way distinction. But the first paragraph talks about a “Yorkshire distinction” between originally long and lengthened vowels which the subsequent paragraph promptly ignores; I’m sort of confused by this. There are actually two distinctions going on here if both paragraphs are accurate: For (most? all?) unmerged speakers, there are three unmerged phonemes corresponding to FLEECE of other English dialects: CREAM /ɪə/, RECEIVE /ɛɪ/ and FEET /iː/; with MEAT words being merged with either CREAM (according to the second paragraph) or RECEIVE (according to the first paragraph).
What I’d like to see explained: is the RECEIVE vowel merged with the EIGHT vowel, as the spelling "eigh" would suggest? Is the /ɛɪ/ pronunciation "almost extinct" only for words like "cream", or is it also rare in words like "key"/"receive"? Do any speakers have only two lexical sets for these words? If so, which of the above three categories merge? 130.71.254.49 ( talk) 14:52, 30 April 2015 (UTC)
I tagged this with citation needed, as my personal experience living in Pen-pin merged areas shows that context is always adequate and clarification is not needed. If no citation can be found, I suggest this sentence be removed. 129.110.116.65 ( talk) 09:00, 11 March 2010 (UTC)
As a non-linguist who is not an expert in this field of study, I have a really hard time conceptualizing some of these pronunciation differences, and I don't know how to read IPA.
It would be very helpful for us laymen, for this article to include audio examples of what the distinguished pronunciation sounds like and what the merged sounds like. DMahalko ( talk) 23:56, 12 February 2011 (UTC)
I see the article says:
As in the statement above, I suspect that the lack of pin-pen merging occurs in many places in Texas, not just Austin. In fact, I live in Austin and the large majority of speakers here don't have a southern accent at all, although "y'all" is fairly widespread. A few people I know do have an accent of sorts, and they typically grew up in a small Texas town somewhere -- and even then their accent is not very strong. I think a lot of the reason for this is that most people who live here (like me) aren't from here, and hence the "native" accent is drowned in a sea of GA speakers. Same goes probably for the other large cities in Texas -- and probably throughout the south. A good friend of mine grew up in the suburbs of Houston and she has no accent (i.e. a GA accent!). A friend of mine grew up in Atlanta and he had no accent either. Benwing ( talk) 06:04, 5 September 2011 (UTC)
I'm using IE, and I'm trying to make it so incoming links from Happy tensing take me to the right section, but it always jumps to a footnote after doing so. If anyone knows the secret, I'd be grateful. Victor Yus ( talk) 19:01, 23 May 2012 (UTC)
What's that called and is there an article or article section on it? I've noticed it most in the speech of people from the New Jersey and southern New York area. One example, instead of rādiator they say rădiator. Bizzybody ( talk) 03:40, 12 October 2012 (UTC)
In which word rhymes with /ɨr/ ? Fort123 ( talk) 19:09, 25 April 2013 (UTC)
The article currently says this: "South Africans are often stereotyped as pronouncing "woman" and "women" the same way, as "women" has the vowel [ə]. In reality, they are distinct in South African English. "woman" is /wʊmən/ and "women" is /wəmən/, so they are distinct and never confused."
I have asked quite a few South African English speakers about this, and each and every one has told me that "woman" and "women" *are* homophonous, and I have observed confusion based on this. So, unless there's a legitimate source, I suggest this addendum be removed (it's not terribly relevant to the kit/bit split in the first place anyway). WmGB ( talk) 11:39, 28 January 2015 (UTC)
It is not clear what merged into what in the introduction. Had the vowel in "meet" already shifted to [iː] back then? Because it continues with describing different stages of English, which is really confusing. -- 2.245.156.161 ( talk) 05:00, 9 October 2016 (UTC)
Please add to the article answers to the following questions:
Thank you! DBlomgren ( talk) 05:10, 1 September 2017 (UTC)
The section on 'happy tensing' states that the use of the tenser 'i' form (equivalent to the 'ee' of 'fleet') is 'becoming more common in modern RP'. The only authority cited is a book by J. C. Wells finalised around 1980 (his Preface is dated January 1981). This is nearly 40 years old, and I would say that the 'old' pronunciation is now practically extinct. At least, I think the article should say that the tenser form *was* stated to be becoming more common around 1980 without implying that this is still the case. Personally, I think the 'old' form was a minority usage long before this. We now have easy access to many old recordings as a basis for comparison. For example, Kenneth Clark in his 'Civilisation' series in 1969 uses the 'new' form, and I presume Clark would be accepted as a true RP speaker. Or Patrick Macnee (an Old Etonian playing an upper-class character) uses the 'new' pronunciation in his role as John Steed in 'The Avengers' (mid-60s). In fact, I have not found any clear examples of the supposed traditional pronunciation from any period, though in some cases the speaker's vowels are so clipped that it is difficult to be sure quite what they are saying. 109.149.2.121 ( talk) 15:11, 2 April 2018 (UTC) [Added] For older examples one can turn to the films of Laurence Olivier, such as his Hamlet (1948) and Henry V (1944). The soliloquy from Hamlet and the famous St Crispin's Day speech from Henry V are easily accessible on YouTube. In both of these the 'happy vowel' occurs several times (in Henry V including the actual word 'happy') and in all of these, as far as I can tell, Olivier uses the supposedly 'new' pronunciation. 109.149.2.39 ( talk) 10:39, 8 April 2018 (UTC)
It recently occurred to me that there are certain words with /ɪ/ in Received Pronunciation that sometimes have /i/ in addition to /ə/ in General American: for instance, the first syllables of before and enough. In many of these the vowel is in an unstressed syllable immediately before the stress. I wonder if this is commented on in any sources. — Eru· tuon 22:24, 11 September 2018 (UTC)
The article says that when a non-rhotic accent has the weak-vowel merger, then historic /ər/ automatically merges with the weak vowel as well. This is not true for German L2-speakers, who usually have a weak-vowel merger (or at most a very feeble and irregular distinction), but who commonly use [ɐ] for /ər/, which is distinct from /ə/. This means that chatted is [tʃɛtəd], but chattered is [tʃɛtɐd]. But I suppose there are no native accents that do this, are there? (Then nevermind.) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2.201.0.62 ( talk) 00:15, 23 March 2019 (UTC)
Please hold off on editing other American English-based dialect pages before we've had a discussion on this. Wolfdog ( talk) 13:43, 3 January 2021 (UTC)
As for transcribing Rosa's roses, it would be weird to ignore one reduced vowel and transcribe another, as in [ˈɹoʊzəz ˈɹoʊzɪz] above. It would either be [ˈɹoʊzʌz ˈɹoʊzɪz] (if we're ignoring reduced vowels, which IMO is not a good idea) or [ˈɹoʊzəz ˈɹoʊzᵻz]. Also, English, or at least GA, does not have 2ary (or 3ary) stress. That's just a way to avoid transcribing reduced vowels. If we're going to do that (again a bad idea IMO), then to be consistent we would want [ˈɹoʊzʌ] for Rosa, vs e.g. [ˈɒmnɪˌbʌs] for omnibus. Without the fake 2ary stress (which in dictionaries has different meanings depending on whether it occurs before a 1ary stress mark or after), those would be [ˈɹoʊzə] and [ˈɒmnᵻbʌs].
We used to make this distinction in pandialectical transcriptions, but a few years ago abandoned the high reduced vowels, transcribing them as full vowels, so that now ⟨ɪ⟩ and ⟨ʊ⟩ are ambiguous. Another bad idea, IMO, but I was outvoted and wasn't involved in WP enough any longer to make a fuss about it. — kwami ( talk) 20:11, 4 January 2021 (UTC)
Reg. the article link Aeusoes just posted, that would only apply to GA, of course, but since it shows a predictable positional difference that would rarely have exceptions for WP purposes, it would make sense to me to transcribe all GA reduced vowels as ⟨ə⟩, in order to avoid conflating them with the KIT vowel, which is a meaningful distinction. /ə/ would just have a variety of phonetic realizations, as is common with reduced vowels. — kwami ( talk) 20:18, 4 January 2021 (UTC)
BTW, the JIPA article uses ⟨ə⟩ and ⟨ɨ⟩. Don't know why they think people reading JIPA wouldn't have font support for those vowels. The article is available at JSTOR. — kwami ( talk) 20:25, 4 January 2021 (UTC)
As for transcribing Rosa's roses... It would either be [ˈɹoʊzʌz ˈɹoʊzɪz] (if we're ignoring reduced vowels, which IMO is not a good idea) or [ˈɹoʊzəz ˈɹoʊzᵻz]. Wolfdog ( talk) 14:43, 8 January 2021 (UTC)
I object to ⟨ɪ⟩ because unreduced /ɪ/ is phonemically distinct, parallel to ⟨ə⟩ vs ⟨ʌ⟩. (And indeed there are dictionaries that transcribe the STRUT vowel as ⟨ə⟩, or actually as ⟨ˌə⟩.) I support a phonetic distinction between mid and high (and rounded) reduced vowels. Phonemically, I agree they should be merged where there's merger, but there's the question of whether RP maintains a distinction. I thought it did, but it would be nice to see a follow-up of the JIPA article demonstrating that. If it doesn't, then we should use ⟨ə⟩ in our pan-dialectical IPAc-en transcriptions. If it does, then I still object to current ⟨ɪ⟩ as being ambiguous. I suppose phonemic ⟨ɨ⟩ rather than former ⟨ᵻ⟩ would be okay. We've had vociferous objections in the past that it's not phonetically [ɨ], but if we have RS's that it's pretty close, we can override them. I'm half tempted to resurrect ⟨ˌ⟩ and label that "unstressed unreduced vowel" rather than 2ary stress, despite the contradiction to its supposed IPA definition, but I doubt that any dictionary uses it consistently that way, so that would probably just make a mess of things. — kwami ( talk) 18:52, 8 January 2021 (UTC)
@ Wolfdog: Is this an acceptable rendering of /ə/ [1] (from 0:55 onwards)? The singer is Russian, but the way she sings look around sounds almost like lucky round ([lʊkɪɹaʊnd] when you ignore syllable boundaries EDIT: In fact the syllable boundaries are exactly the same) as pronounced in a Northern English accent. She seems to make the schwa too close and front in that phrase. Sol505000 ( talk) 19:14, 9 January 2021 (UTC)
Word-initial and word-final ⟨ə⟩for ya? And if immense begins with a non-reduced /ɪ/, then isn't that irrelevant to this discussion, which is about reduced /ɪ/? (Wish I could've taken Nardog's original advice
to not mull over it too much.) Wolfdog ( talk) 01:35, 10 January 2021 (UTC)
I must've misread the rule. It would seem easier to say "[ɨ] internally and [ə] at the margins". Does the vowel ever occur in an *open* non-initial syllable, that we need to specify that it's closed? Maybe I'm missing something. — kwami ( talk) 22:46, 14 January 2021 (UTC)
Sol, your efforts to replace every unstressed American English /-ɪŋ/ with /-əŋ/ don't seem to be widely accepted by other editors. Is there any good evidence for us to believe that this a weak-merged vowel environment? (Not every unstressed /ɪ/ is reduced, of course.) Why can't we just keep /ɪŋ/ in these cases? Wolfdog ( talk) 22:29, 4 February 2021 (UTC)
Wells mentions this in the preface to LPD, saying such vowels are transcribed as /ɪ/ before palato-alveolar and velar consonants (and in prefixes re-, e-, de- until 2nd ed.) unless "no separate indication is given for AmE", where the merger is only implicit.That's the source we needed I guess? Sol505000 ( talk) 09:52, 5 February 2021 (UTC)
The weak vowel merger means no contrast between /ɪ/ and /ə/ in unstressed syllables, so /ˈkɛrləs/ is the correct phonemic notation for the pronunciation with the merger, regardless of the phonetic quality of the merged vowel (unless you're wacky enough to transcribe all schwas as /ɪ/).? Sol505000 ( talk) 13:12, 5 February 2021 (UTC)
I just reverted a mistaken change to the pronunciation of Natchitoches, Louisiana where the edit summary was saying to not assume a weak vowel merger. The existing pronunciation given was more representative of how the city's name is pronounced than the edit. Carter ( talk) 17:00, 21 March 2021 (UTC)
We could mention here that in many broad conservative varieties of the Black Country dialect ‘meat’ has a long e unlike ‘meet’ and I’ve heard some odd short vowels in Northern Ireland, such as ‘pen’ sounding like ‘pan’ to me (as an Englishman) and of course some of the Protestants there famously say ‘flag’ as ‘fleg’. Overlordnat1 ( talk) 22:19, 4 November 2021 (UTC)
I am not into orthoepy and am not in possession of any works on linguistics, but I noticed that there is evidence of all three realisations of the happY vowel in some of the earliest English pronouncing dictionaries: Kenrick (1773) gives [ɪ], [1] Sheridan (1780) gives [i] as distinct from both [ɪ] and [iː], [2] whilst Walker (1791) gives [iː]. [3] Ergo, the statement that it had not been mentioned by linguists until the early XX century seems false – and by quite a margin; not being very confident in the field, I hope someone with better access to writings on English phonology might be able to find some more information on this topic and perhaps improve the section. Walker. -- Maciuf ( talk) 12:56, 4 January 2022 (UTC)
References
Never mind the far far rarer Scottish (and Kiwi and South African) variant ‘fush and chups’, why no mention here of the standard Scottish pronunciation (which I would personally say is more common in Glasgow and Ayrshire than elsewhere) of ‘fesh and cheps’? Overlordnat1 ( talk) 07:23, 9 January 2022 (UTC)
Should every example be sourced? With recent additions the tables are looking strange, with peculiar examples like Lemmy || Limmy, Seine || sin, seraph || serif, Stata'd || started and Lennon || Lenin. IMO examples should include common words, not names or smth like 'Stata'd' (what does it even mean?). Artem.G ( talk) 07:47, 22 June 2023 (UTC)
Surely you mean Rose's here? 142.205.202.71 ( talk) 17:32, 2 July 2023 (UTC)
This article has not yet been rated on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Is this what's happening to my "hundred", "pretended", "cases", etc.? Jimp 4Oct05
I'm from Sydney, Australia. I do rhyme abbot and rabit and my pretended is /prətendəd/. Jimp 19Dec05
I don't know what the article means by "While there are some dialects that have a variable distinction, there are very few dialects that maintain a complete distinction."-- JHJ 16:27, 4 October 2005 (UTC)
I've changed the last two paragraphs:
into one much shorter one:
New Zealand English does not have a kit-bit split, so a discussion of what happens in New Zealand English isn't really relevant. With those two paragraphs, the article is one-third about the kit-bit split and two-thirds about some different phenomenon that only involves the same phoneme and a similar realisation of it. It also seems a bit odd having so much discussion about perceptions of Australians' and New Zealanders' language use (and what they do) in an article about a phenomenon limited to South African English.
— Felix the Cassowary ( ɑe hɪː jɐ) 03:57, 19 December 2005 (UTC)
What is the trigger condition for the Lennon-Lenin merger? Linguofreak 23:37, 18 March 2006 (UTC)
I spoke with some people from Arkansas and they seemed to change /ɛ/ to a diphthong /ɛɪ/. For instance, he said 'spent' as /spɛɪnt/. Is there any source that has noted this? Cameron Nedland 20:12, 6 May 2007 (UTC)
I and most people I speak with distinguish pen and pin, and I am a native Texan. The sentence saying that it has merged through all of Texas is unsourced and invalid, so I have changed it. LokiClock ( talk) 21:24, 23 August 2008 (UTC)
I second the above statement. I was born and raised in Texas, and I distinguish pen and pin, along with nearly everyone else I know. However, older members of my family from more rural parts of Texas do not distinguish between the two words, so from what I can see the merger applies only to rural and older speakers, so saying it is completely merged for most speakers is completely wrong. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 173.173.94.80 ( talk) 00:45, 30 June 2011 (UTC)
The kit-bit split is a split of EME /ɪ/ found in South African English [...]
What is meant by "EME" here? -- Picapica 12:17, 22 May 2007 (UTC)
I don't think I'm unusual in lowering /ɛ/ to /e/ before g (as in beg, egg.) Is there a name for this phenomenon? What is its geographical distribution? (I'm from California.) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.167.203.61 ( talk) 00:05, 5 January 2008 (UTC)
My ears and memory tell me that the pin-pen merger is very widespread in the United States. This article makes it seems as if few places outside of the South have this merger. That really doesn't seem to be the case. Turn on the TV sometime and you will hear many non-Southern people with this merger. Pronouncing pen with /ɛ/ sounds affected and pretentious (not to mention strange) to my ears, and I'm sure it sounds that way for many other Americans as well. As of now, there is no comprehensive guide to American English, so I figure my guess is as good as anyone's. I am not from the South, by the way. 208.104.45.20 ( talk) 05:13, 27 April 2008 (UTC)
Just so that you know, I have been watching a lot of American television, and I can guarantee that many Americans DO in fact have idea-smoothing in their speech. The first and last episodes of Deep Space Nine have Odo (Rene Auberjonois or whatever) and Jake Sisko (Cirroc Lofton) respectively, both saying "idea" with /I@/ at the end, not /i:@/. Jonathan Kent (John Schneider) in Smallville also says it the same way.
I don't know how to cite a television programme as a source, but there you go. If anyone else sees a programme with idea-smoothing in it, American or not, it might be worth mentioning it here, just so that people know it most certainly DOES exist in American English and many other forms of English. Avengah ( talk) 02:48, 29 April 2008 (UTC)
Also? "Idea smoothing", like almost all of the section headings in this article except "pin-pen merger", and some of the section headings in Phonological history of English low back vowels, is a neologism. The name "idea-smoothing" appears to have been invented for this article; I don't believe it's used by linguists. Likewise "met-mat merger", "lot-cloth split", and so on. AJD ( talk) 21:16, 29 April 2008 (UTC)
I've got another one. Chakotay (Robert Beltram) in Voyager, Season 1 episode 7 "Eye of the Needle", at 5 minutes in. Clearly /I@/. Avengah ( talk) 07:55, 7 May 2008 (UTC)
The article seems pretty clear about the distinction and merger of ee and ea. But what it's not clear at all about is the status of long e, for example in the word mete. In non-merging accents, is mete pronounced like meet or meat? I know that, for long o, bone and moan had the same vowel in Early Modern English, but whether long e was the same as ee or ea in Early Modern English is not made clear. - Gilgamesh ( talk) 07:12, 24 February 2009 (UTC)
I still want to know. - Gilgamesh ( talk) 01:06, 14 August 2011 (UTC)
We still need more information on the third lexical set described for Yorkshire dialects; the text as written is extremely unclear about it.
“The words team and cream, which have /ɪə/ in the traditional Yorkshire accents, have original long vowels, going back to Old English tēam and Old French creme respectively, while eat (< OE etan) and meat (< OE mete) have vowels that were originally short but lengthened by Middle English open syllable lenthening. This is the origin of the Yorkshire distinction. In accents with the distinction, the vowel /ɪə/ is usually represented by the spellings ea and eCe, as in neat and complete, and the vowel /ɛɪ/ is usually represented by the spellings ei and ey, as in receive and key, and the vowel /iː/ is usually represented by the spellings ee, ie and iCe as in feet, thief and suite, as well as plain e in the monosyllabic words be, he, me, she, the (when stressed), we and ye.”
This isn’t a two-way, but a three-way distinction. But the first paragraph talks about a “Yorkshire distinction” between originally long and lengthened vowels which the subsequent paragraph promptly ignores; I’m sort of confused by this. There are actually two distinctions going on here if both paragraphs are accurate: For (most? all?) unmerged speakers, there are three unmerged phonemes corresponding to FLEECE of other English dialects: CREAM /ɪə/, RECEIVE /ɛɪ/ and FEET /iː/; with MEAT words being merged with either CREAM (according to the second paragraph) or RECEIVE (according to the first paragraph).
What I’d like to see explained: is the RECEIVE vowel merged with the EIGHT vowel, as the spelling "eigh" would suggest? Is the /ɛɪ/ pronunciation "almost extinct" only for words like "cream", or is it also rare in words like "key"/"receive"? Do any speakers have only two lexical sets for these words? If so, which of the above three categories merge? 130.71.254.49 ( talk) 14:52, 30 April 2015 (UTC)
I tagged this with citation needed, as my personal experience living in Pen-pin merged areas shows that context is always adequate and clarification is not needed. If no citation can be found, I suggest this sentence be removed. 129.110.116.65 ( talk) 09:00, 11 March 2010 (UTC)
As a non-linguist who is not an expert in this field of study, I have a really hard time conceptualizing some of these pronunciation differences, and I don't know how to read IPA.
It would be very helpful for us laymen, for this article to include audio examples of what the distinguished pronunciation sounds like and what the merged sounds like. DMahalko ( talk) 23:56, 12 February 2011 (UTC)
I see the article says:
As in the statement above, I suspect that the lack of pin-pen merging occurs in many places in Texas, not just Austin. In fact, I live in Austin and the large majority of speakers here don't have a southern accent at all, although "y'all" is fairly widespread. A few people I know do have an accent of sorts, and they typically grew up in a small Texas town somewhere -- and even then their accent is not very strong. I think a lot of the reason for this is that most people who live here (like me) aren't from here, and hence the "native" accent is drowned in a sea of GA speakers. Same goes probably for the other large cities in Texas -- and probably throughout the south. A good friend of mine grew up in the suburbs of Houston and she has no accent (i.e. a GA accent!). A friend of mine grew up in Atlanta and he had no accent either. Benwing ( talk) 06:04, 5 September 2011 (UTC)
I'm using IE, and I'm trying to make it so incoming links from Happy tensing take me to the right section, but it always jumps to a footnote after doing so. If anyone knows the secret, I'd be grateful. Victor Yus ( talk) 19:01, 23 May 2012 (UTC)
What's that called and is there an article or article section on it? I've noticed it most in the speech of people from the New Jersey and southern New York area. One example, instead of rādiator they say rădiator. Bizzybody ( talk) 03:40, 12 October 2012 (UTC)
In which word rhymes with /ɨr/ ? Fort123 ( talk) 19:09, 25 April 2013 (UTC)
The article currently says this: "South Africans are often stereotyped as pronouncing "woman" and "women" the same way, as "women" has the vowel [ə]. In reality, they are distinct in South African English. "woman" is /wʊmən/ and "women" is /wəmən/, so they are distinct and never confused."
I have asked quite a few South African English speakers about this, and each and every one has told me that "woman" and "women" *are* homophonous, and I have observed confusion based on this. So, unless there's a legitimate source, I suggest this addendum be removed (it's not terribly relevant to the kit/bit split in the first place anyway). WmGB ( talk) 11:39, 28 January 2015 (UTC)
It is not clear what merged into what in the introduction. Had the vowel in "meet" already shifted to [iː] back then? Because it continues with describing different stages of English, which is really confusing. -- 2.245.156.161 ( talk) 05:00, 9 October 2016 (UTC)
Please add to the article answers to the following questions:
Thank you! DBlomgren ( talk) 05:10, 1 September 2017 (UTC)
The section on 'happy tensing' states that the use of the tenser 'i' form (equivalent to the 'ee' of 'fleet') is 'becoming more common in modern RP'. The only authority cited is a book by J. C. Wells finalised around 1980 (his Preface is dated January 1981). This is nearly 40 years old, and I would say that the 'old' pronunciation is now practically extinct. At least, I think the article should say that the tenser form *was* stated to be becoming more common around 1980 without implying that this is still the case. Personally, I think the 'old' form was a minority usage long before this. We now have easy access to many old recordings as a basis for comparison. For example, Kenneth Clark in his 'Civilisation' series in 1969 uses the 'new' form, and I presume Clark would be accepted as a true RP speaker. Or Patrick Macnee (an Old Etonian playing an upper-class character) uses the 'new' pronunciation in his role as John Steed in 'The Avengers' (mid-60s). In fact, I have not found any clear examples of the supposed traditional pronunciation from any period, though in some cases the speaker's vowels are so clipped that it is difficult to be sure quite what they are saying. 109.149.2.121 ( talk) 15:11, 2 April 2018 (UTC) [Added] For older examples one can turn to the films of Laurence Olivier, such as his Hamlet (1948) and Henry V (1944). The soliloquy from Hamlet and the famous St Crispin's Day speech from Henry V are easily accessible on YouTube. In both of these the 'happy vowel' occurs several times (in Henry V including the actual word 'happy') and in all of these, as far as I can tell, Olivier uses the supposedly 'new' pronunciation. 109.149.2.39 ( talk) 10:39, 8 April 2018 (UTC)
It recently occurred to me that there are certain words with /ɪ/ in Received Pronunciation that sometimes have /i/ in addition to /ə/ in General American: for instance, the first syllables of before and enough. In many of these the vowel is in an unstressed syllable immediately before the stress. I wonder if this is commented on in any sources. — Eru· tuon 22:24, 11 September 2018 (UTC)
The article says that when a non-rhotic accent has the weak-vowel merger, then historic /ər/ automatically merges with the weak vowel as well. This is not true for German L2-speakers, who usually have a weak-vowel merger (or at most a very feeble and irregular distinction), but who commonly use [ɐ] for /ər/, which is distinct from /ə/. This means that chatted is [tʃɛtəd], but chattered is [tʃɛtɐd]. But I suppose there are no native accents that do this, are there? (Then nevermind.) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2.201.0.62 ( talk) 00:15, 23 March 2019 (UTC)
Please hold off on editing other American English-based dialect pages before we've had a discussion on this. Wolfdog ( talk) 13:43, 3 January 2021 (UTC)
As for transcribing Rosa's roses, it would be weird to ignore one reduced vowel and transcribe another, as in [ˈɹoʊzəz ˈɹoʊzɪz] above. It would either be [ˈɹoʊzʌz ˈɹoʊzɪz] (if we're ignoring reduced vowels, which IMO is not a good idea) or [ˈɹoʊzəz ˈɹoʊzᵻz]. Also, English, or at least GA, does not have 2ary (or 3ary) stress. That's just a way to avoid transcribing reduced vowels. If we're going to do that (again a bad idea IMO), then to be consistent we would want [ˈɹoʊzʌ] for Rosa, vs e.g. [ˈɒmnɪˌbʌs] for omnibus. Without the fake 2ary stress (which in dictionaries has different meanings depending on whether it occurs before a 1ary stress mark or after), those would be [ˈɹoʊzə] and [ˈɒmnᵻbʌs].
We used to make this distinction in pandialectical transcriptions, but a few years ago abandoned the high reduced vowels, transcribing them as full vowels, so that now ⟨ɪ⟩ and ⟨ʊ⟩ are ambiguous. Another bad idea, IMO, but I was outvoted and wasn't involved in WP enough any longer to make a fuss about it. — kwami ( talk) 20:11, 4 January 2021 (UTC)
Reg. the article link Aeusoes just posted, that would only apply to GA, of course, but since it shows a predictable positional difference that would rarely have exceptions for WP purposes, it would make sense to me to transcribe all GA reduced vowels as ⟨ə⟩, in order to avoid conflating them with the KIT vowel, which is a meaningful distinction. /ə/ would just have a variety of phonetic realizations, as is common with reduced vowels. — kwami ( talk) 20:18, 4 January 2021 (UTC)
BTW, the JIPA article uses ⟨ə⟩ and ⟨ɨ⟩. Don't know why they think people reading JIPA wouldn't have font support for those vowels. The article is available at JSTOR. — kwami ( talk) 20:25, 4 January 2021 (UTC)
As for transcribing Rosa's roses... It would either be [ˈɹoʊzʌz ˈɹoʊzɪz] (if we're ignoring reduced vowels, which IMO is not a good idea) or [ˈɹoʊzəz ˈɹoʊzᵻz]. Wolfdog ( talk) 14:43, 8 January 2021 (UTC)
I object to ⟨ɪ⟩ because unreduced /ɪ/ is phonemically distinct, parallel to ⟨ə⟩ vs ⟨ʌ⟩. (And indeed there are dictionaries that transcribe the STRUT vowel as ⟨ə⟩, or actually as ⟨ˌə⟩.) I support a phonetic distinction between mid and high (and rounded) reduced vowels. Phonemically, I agree they should be merged where there's merger, but there's the question of whether RP maintains a distinction. I thought it did, but it would be nice to see a follow-up of the JIPA article demonstrating that. If it doesn't, then we should use ⟨ə⟩ in our pan-dialectical IPAc-en transcriptions. If it does, then I still object to current ⟨ɪ⟩ as being ambiguous. I suppose phonemic ⟨ɨ⟩ rather than former ⟨ᵻ⟩ would be okay. We've had vociferous objections in the past that it's not phonetically [ɨ], but if we have RS's that it's pretty close, we can override them. I'm half tempted to resurrect ⟨ˌ⟩ and label that "unstressed unreduced vowel" rather than 2ary stress, despite the contradiction to its supposed IPA definition, but I doubt that any dictionary uses it consistently that way, so that would probably just make a mess of things. — kwami ( talk) 18:52, 8 January 2021 (UTC)
@ Wolfdog: Is this an acceptable rendering of /ə/ [1] (from 0:55 onwards)? The singer is Russian, but the way she sings look around sounds almost like lucky round ([lʊkɪɹaʊnd] when you ignore syllable boundaries EDIT: In fact the syllable boundaries are exactly the same) as pronounced in a Northern English accent. She seems to make the schwa too close and front in that phrase. Sol505000 ( talk) 19:14, 9 January 2021 (UTC)
Word-initial and word-final ⟨ə⟩for ya? And if immense begins with a non-reduced /ɪ/, then isn't that irrelevant to this discussion, which is about reduced /ɪ/? (Wish I could've taken Nardog's original advice
to not mull over it too much.) Wolfdog ( talk) 01:35, 10 January 2021 (UTC)
I must've misread the rule. It would seem easier to say "[ɨ] internally and [ə] at the margins". Does the vowel ever occur in an *open* non-initial syllable, that we need to specify that it's closed? Maybe I'm missing something. — kwami ( talk) 22:46, 14 January 2021 (UTC)
Sol, your efforts to replace every unstressed American English /-ɪŋ/ with /-əŋ/ don't seem to be widely accepted by other editors. Is there any good evidence for us to believe that this a weak-merged vowel environment? (Not every unstressed /ɪ/ is reduced, of course.) Why can't we just keep /ɪŋ/ in these cases? Wolfdog ( talk) 22:29, 4 February 2021 (UTC)
Wells mentions this in the preface to LPD, saying such vowels are transcribed as /ɪ/ before palato-alveolar and velar consonants (and in prefixes re-, e-, de- until 2nd ed.) unless "no separate indication is given for AmE", where the merger is only implicit.That's the source we needed I guess? Sol505000 ( talk) 09:52, 5 February 2021 (UTC)
The weak vowel merger means no contrast between /ɪ/ and /ə/ in unstressed syllables, so /ˈkɛrləs/ is the correct phonemic notation for the pronunciation with the merger, regardless of the phonetic quality of the merged vowel (unless you're wacky enough to transcribe all schwas as /ɪ/).? Sol505000 ( talk) 13:12, 5 February 2021 (UTC)
I just reverted a mistaken change to the pronunciation of Natchitoches, Louisiana where the edit summary was saying to not assume a weak vowel merger. The existing pronunciation given was more representative of how the city's name is pronounced than the edit. Carter ( talk) 17:00, 21 March 2021 (UTC)
We could mention here that in many broad conservative varieties of the Black Country dialect ‘meat’ has a long e unlike ‘meet’ and I’ve heard some odd short vowels in Northern Ireland, such as ‘pen’ sounding like ‘pan’ to me (as an Englishman) and of course some of the Protestants there famously say ‘flag’ as ‘fleg’. Overlordnat1 ( talk) 22:19, 4 November 2021 (UTC)
I am not into orthoepy and am not in possession of any works on linguistics, but I noticed that there is evidence of all three realisations of the happY vowel in some of the earliest English pronouncing dictionaries: Kenrick (1773) gives [ɪ], [1] Sheridan (1780) gives [i] as distinct from both [ɪ] and [iː], [2] whilst Walker (1791) gives [iː]. [3] Ergo, the statement that it had not been mentioned by linguists until the early XX century seems false – and by quite a margin; not being very confident in the field, I hope someone with better access to writings on English phonology might be able to find some more information on this topic and perhaps improve the section. Walker. -- Maciuf ( talk) 12:56, 4 January 2022 (UTC)
References
Never mind the far far rarer Scottish (and Kiwi and South African) variant ‘fush and chups’, why no mention here of the standard Scottish pronunciation (which I would personally say is more common in Glasgow and Ayrshire than elsewhere) of ‘fesh and cheps’? Overlordnat1 ( talk) 07:23, 9 January 2022 (UTC)
Should every example be sourced? With recent additions the tables are looking strange, with peculiar examples like Lemmy || Limmy, Seine || sin, seraph || serif, Stata'd || started and Lennon || Lenin. IMO examples should include common words, not names or smth like 'Stata'd' (what does it even mean?). Artem.G ( talk) 07:47, 22 June 2023 (UTC)
Surely you mean Rose's here? 142.205.202.71 ( talk) 17:32, 2 July 2023 (UTC)