costed

Sarcastic New Mexican   Fri Jul 27, 2007 4:52 am GMT
>> Heh - there are distinct [na:] and [nE{:] here, which I write as "nah" and "neah" myself. <<

There's just [n{] here.
Uriel   Fri Jul 27, 2007 8:04 am GMT
I've heard "boughten" before, but never "caughten". That's a weird word. Of course, so are "broughten" and "brung".
Travis   Fri Jul 27, 2007 1:27 pm GMT
>>I meant of course that it's checked in my dialect. As for the opposite of 'yeah', I think I would phonemicize it as /nan/, since it's pronounced [nE@~], and [E@] is the regular realization of /a/ before /n/. I never pronounce the final /n/ though, unlike other words with /an/ that vary.<<

I forgot about the nasalization there, which is present here as well. Note that I would not actually transcribe it as /nE{n/, because /n/-elision is always optional in my dialect, and thus such would actually imply that *[nE{:~n] is an extant surface form. (And note that my "nah" is always [na:], not *[na~:].

This one actually implies that my dialect really does have phonemic vowel nasalization (however marginal), which would be very convenient analysis-wise as it would also allow introducing phonemic consonant length. The reason for this is that there are discrepancies in vowel nasalization before [n:] and [m:] in my dialect which I have previously treated by always analyzing them as nasal-lenis stop sequences even if such are not synchronically present; by having phonemic vowel nasality I can avoid such and simply analyze them as /n:/ and /m:/. (Of course, the reason for introducing phonemic consonant length is that there are other cases of consonant length which cannot be analyzed away in my dialect, such as "adjust" [@:"dZVst] versus "suggest" [s@:"dZ:Est], as there is no synchronic evidence for */s@g"dZEst/ in my dialect.)

(Mind you that I do not actually think the above is really all *that* dialect-specific, and I would not be surprised if a good range of NAE dialect had at least marginal phonemic consonant length, due to isolated words like "suggest", which itself seems to very often have a long consonant in NAE, and phonemic vowel nasality, due to words like "neah".)
Travis   Fri Jul 27, 2007 2:01 pm GMT
>>I've heard "boughten" before, but never "caughten". That's a weird word. Of course, so are "broughten" and "brung".<<

Yes, "boughten" seems much more common than other similar forms such as "broughten", "caughten", "foughten", "soughten", "taughten", "wroughten", and so on, with many dialects having it but lacking the others. Even here one is more likely to hear "boughten" than the others.