Phonetic description of English

Llorenna   Sat Dec 30, 2006 12:15 am GMT
I found this on professor Canepari's page:
http://venus.unive.it/canipa/pdf/HPr_02_English.pdf

Do you think it is too artificial?
Especially his description of ''General American'' (where is it spoken at all?)
Also, his description of Canadian English is not very accurate (the merged vowel is the same as British pop, dog vowel? -well, this is true of shifted female speech and people from Ottawa area, but it is not the general pronunciation [although Oxord Canadian dictionary uses it]...A is preferred in Eastern Canada [by everyone] and non-shifted people in other regions of Canada (mostly males...)[
Guest   Sat Dec 30, 2006 1:44 am GMT
Isn't General American just cot-caught unmerged Western or Canadian English?
Lazar   Sat Dec 30, 2006 5:00 am GMT
<<Isn't General American just cot-caught unmerged Western or Canadian English?>>

Well, about 50-60% of Americans do make the cot-caught distinction, and dictionaries almost universally list the distinction. I'd say that nowadays the cot-caught merger would probably be optional for General American.

I also don't think a Canadian accent could (strictly speaking) be considered General American, because there are some features (like raising of the /aU/ diphthong, the pronunciations of "sorry", "tomorrow", "pasta", etc.) that I think would stand out.

Anyway...

<<I found this on professor Canepari's page:...>>

I think his work is really interesting, and a lot of his transcription is really very good. But there are some areas where I disagree with him. For example, he transcribes the General American /E/ phoneme (in other words, the "bet" vowel) as essentially a mid vowel, using the exact same symbol he uses for the Spanish /e/ phoneme. I think he's a bit off the mark there - the vowel that I hear from most Americans is more open than that, and it's definitely not the same as the Spanish "e".

Also, he says that General American "shelter" and "faulty" are pronounced with a flapped t, which I think is just not the case.

<<Especially his description of ''General American'' (where is it spoken at all?)>>

For my part, here's how I would describe General American:

- fully rhotic
- Mary-merry-marry merger
- hurry-furry merger
- serious-Sirius merger
- Tory-torrent merger (variable)
- flapping of unstressed intervocalic /t/ and /d/
- reduction of /nt/ to /n/ (variable)
- lack of California shift or Northern Cities vowel shift
- "cot" as [A]
- "caught" as [Q] or [A]

I think there are a lot of people (especially in some areas like Connecticut and parts of the Great Plains and the West) whose speech would pretty closely approximate that. I consider General American to be a sort of "baseline" with which the various regional dialects can be compared.