Page 90 - DENG504_LINGUISTICS

Linguistics

Notes we think of the vowel in bad as being a “short a” and the vowel in bathe as being a “long a.” But the
two sounds are quite different and articulated in different parts of the mouth. Bathe has a “long”
sound because it is a diphthong, not because it has the sound of bad lengthened. We call both of these
vowels “a” sounds just because of an accident of spelling.
Historical Example

Here’s an example of what I mean by the stability of consonants and the variability of vowels, both
across time and across the English-speaking world at a given time.
The Old English words stan, ham, bat, and rad correspond to the Modern English words stone, home,
boat and road. The Old English words were pronounced with an open back vowel; the standard
modern American pronunciation of those words has the diphthong /ow/. Yet the consonants of the
Old English words are substantially identical to the consonants of the modern American words. The
consonants have remained stable for 1,500 years while the vowels have changed a great deal.
At the present moment, the consonants in stone, home, boat and road are pretty much stable in all
English dialects, except that the majority of British speakers have no initial consonant in home and
may also substitute a glottal stop for the final /t/ in boat. So there’s great stability in this age-old
consonant pattern at the present moment.
But there’s enormous variability world-wide in the vowels of these words. This variability is the
basic manifestation of what we call “accents” or dialectal differences in pronunciation. The OE vowel
has disappeared from these words, leaving a host of regional variants.
The Standard American vowel in stone is, as I noted, the /ow/ “off-glide” diphthong. The British RP
vowel is also a diphthong, one that starts with the vowel of met and ends with that of put. It’s like the
diphthong in some East Coast US dialects (South Jersey / Philadelphia/ Maryland), which starts
with the vowel of bathe and ends with that of put.
Another British diphthong, that of Southeastern or “Estuary” speakers, starts with the front vowel of
bat and ends ups back and central. Make that a bit longer and you have the distinctive Australian
diphthong in stone, which makes sense because Australian dialects are relatively recent developments
from London English.
By contrast, some English dialects have a short pure vowel /o/--notably South African dialects and
some West Indian dialects. A longer /o/ is a feature of some Irish dialects, but there are Irish speakers
who have a high long pure vowel, almost that of American boot, in stone. If you start with /o/ and
glide into a central vowel, you have the Canadian and Minnesota version of stone, and if you make
the initial /o/ of that diphthong longer, you have the Scottish diphthong--again, Canadian speech
owes a great deal to Scottish English. Finally, if you use a short vowel like that of put in stone, you
have an approximation of the vowel in some Indian dialects.
7.1 Vowels versus Consonants

Several examples in the last chapter involved vowels: for instance, we found that there is free variation
for some speakers between [i] and [e] in economic, but that these two vowels nonetheless contrast, as
shown by minimal pairs like pet- peat, or hell - heal. We also saw that the usual contrast of /ew/, /e/
and / F /, is neutralised before /r/ for many General American speakers, who pronounce Mary,
merry and marry homo-phonously. It follows that the central ideas of phonemic contrast, with minimal
pairs determining the members of the phoneme system, and rules showing allophonic variation in
different contexts, apply equally to vowels and to consonants; free variation, phonetic similarity and
neutralisation affect both classes of sounds too.
However, when we turn to the physical description of actual vowel sounds, it is not possible simply
to reuse the parameters and features already introduced for consonants. Of course, vowels and
consonants are all speech sounds; and in English at least, they are all produced using the same pulmonic
egressive airstream. In almost all other respects, however, the features which allow us to classify and
understand consonants are less than helpful in distinguishing between vowels.

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