Stahlke, Herbert F.W. wrote:
> Good point, Bruce. Has anyone done a comparative description of
> /r/-insertion across dialects? They don't all do it the same:
> Southern US non-rhotic dialects don't do it at all while New England
> dialects do. I don't know the range of variation in British dialects.
>
> Herb
>
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Bruce Despain
> Sent: Friday, July 07, 2006 9:45 AM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: FW: schwa
>
>
>
> Herb,
>
>
>
> What you probably need to say is that the spelling for Pooh's donkey
> friend, Eeyore, comes from the pronunciation of "eeyaw" when followed
> by a word that begins with a vowel. Thus in many non-rhotic dialects
> (as particulary in Australia) there is usually an "r" inserted in such
> cases, such that "eeyaw, eeyaw" becomes "eeyawreeyaw."
>
>
>
> Bruce
>
>
>
>>>> "Stahlke, Herbert F.W." <[log in to unmask]> 07/06/06 9:52 AM >>>
>
> Bruce,
>
> You're right about that, and when Andy Capp says, "Er", he's actually
> pronouncing a mid central vowel with no rhotacization. Another effect
> of the <r> in British Spelling is in the name of AA Milne's donkey, in
> Pooh, Eeyore, pronounce eeyaw, naturally. American speakers usually
> miss the humor on that one.
>
> Herb
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar on behalf of Bruce
> Despain
> Sent: Thu 7/6/2006 8:52 AM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: FW: schwa
>
> Johanna,
>
> It may be relevant to note as well that the schwa is often
> phonetically spelled
> as 'er', I surmise at least by British writers who do not pronounce
> the 'r'.
>
> Bruce
>
>>>> "Stahlke, Herbert F.W." <[log in to unmask]> 07/05/06 8:24 PM >>>
>
> Here's another helpful posting from Johanna. Her point about the
> difficult of
> pronouncing schwa ! in isolation illustrates that fact that in English
> schwa
> occurs only in unstressed syllables, and phonetically untrained
> English speakers
> can't pronounce unstressed syllables by themselves without stressing
> them, which
> will change the vowel sound.
>
> Herb
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Johanna Rubba [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
> <mailto:[log in to unmask]>
> Sent: Wed 7/5/2006 4:42 PM
> To: Stahlke, Herbert F.W.
> Cc: Johanna Rubba
> Subject: Re: schwa
>
> Herb,
>
> I hope you'll post this little addendum to the schwa thread.
>
> -----
> Herb's concentric-circle image is nice. It's important to note one
> other thing: though schwa is often phonetically spelled as 'uh', it is
> not the same vowel sound heard in 'but', 'fun', or 'son'. The vowel in
> these words is very close to schwa, but it is lower (therefore the
> mouth is just a trifle more open). When people break a word up into
> syllables and pronounce each separately, they will stress the normally
> unstressed vowels, which will often come out as 'uh'. This happens to
> my students all the time when they are transcribing words into phonetic
> symbols, and they always ask me about the difference between the two.
> They will pronounce 'about', for instance, as two separate syllables --
> 'uh' and 'bout'. As soon as that first syllable is pronounced alone, it
> receives stress and the vowel changes away from schwa.
>
> Many linguistics book use the same phonetic symbol -- an 'e' rotated
> 180 degrees -- for both of these vowels. Properly, the rotated 'e' is
> for schwa, and the other vowel is represented by a symbol called caret
> -- an upside-down lower-case v.
>
> Some readers may also be a little confused about the relevance of
> tense/lax to schwa. Both tense and lax vowels are subject to
> replacement by schwa in unstressed syllabes: the tense 'ee' sound of
> the 'e' in 'reduce' is normally pron! ounced as schwa, as is the first
> tense /o/ of 'photography'; the tense /u/ of 'tonight', etc.
>
> I might also note that the differences among schwas that Herb describes
> below can also happen to stressed vowels: nearby sounds affect the
> pronunciation of a vowel, because of the need for rapid muscle movement
> noted in my first message. Phonics teaches about 'r-colored' vowels,
> because the /r/ sound affects the vowel pronunciation in more
> noticeable ways than other consonants. /l/ can also have a profound
> effect on a preceding vowel. If a vowel precedes a nasal consonant such
> as /m/, /n/, or the sound we spell '-ng', it will also be nasal -- that
> is, the passage to the nasal cavity will open early and produce a nasal
> vowel. This passage is closed when a nasal sound is not in a word. If
> you're good at stretching out words without distorting them, try saying
> 'back' and 'bank' with very elongated vowels. You might be able to hear
> the di! fference. French has nasal vowel phonemes, hence the difference
> in pronunciation between 'seau' ('bucket') and 'son' ('sound'). The -n-
> of 'son' is not pronounced.
>
>
> On Jul 5, 2006, at 9:11 AM, Stahlke, Herbert F.W. wrote:
>
> Thanks to Johanna for that excellent review of schwa, and to DD for
> forwarding it. I would add only that schwa in English is functionally
> different, in ways that Johanna explains, from schwa in other languages
> where it may well be a separate phoneme. This results in part from the
> major tense/lax contrast in English vowels. The vowel sounds in pea,
> pay, pod (US), pawed, Po, and pool are tense vowels. The vowel sounds
> in pit, pet, pat, putt, and put are lax (Midwestern pronunciation, both
> Lower and Upper North, but not Northern Cities Vowel Shift areas).
> What tense and lax mean physically is that tense vowels are articulated
> with the tongue in more extreme positions, farther from the c! entral,
> rest position, essentially the position for schwa. It takes more
> muscular effort, tension, and time to pronounce these vowels, which is
> why they are longer temporally. Lax vowels aren't as far out from
> schwa physically, so they don't require as much muscular effor. Schwa,
> for English, represents essentially the resting space in the middle of
> the vowel space, and so we can think of the three kinds of vowel
> roughly as three concentric circles, a bit of radical normalization but
> a good image. Tense vowels are the outer circle, lax the inner, and
> schwa the innermost. This implies that schwa is not a single vowel
> sound but a range of sounds varying from the vowel of "just" as in "I
> just left" to the initial vowel of "above", to the slightly rounded
> vowel of "equal". As Johanna notes, this is a function of the dynamics
> of tongue movement as it's going from one vowel or consonant position
> to another.
>
> Herb
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar on behalf of DD Farms
> Sent: Wed 7/5/2006 9:25 AM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: schwa
>
> DD: An extremely interesting note from Dr. Rubba, which I was asked
> to forward. I really didn't have any idea that simple schwa could be
> so complex. But from whence comes that schwa that so many southern
> words seem to end in? No vowel there as spelled, but as pronounced.
> Or is it just that I talk funny?
>
> At 07:55 PM 7/4/2006, Johanna Rubba wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> I am still having trouble posting messages. If this doesn't go to
>> the list, could you post it for me?
>>
>> Here is the dope on schwa, from a Ph.D. linguist who has studied a
>> great deal of phonetics and phonology:
>>
>> Schwa is a mid-central vowel. This means the tongue position for the
>> vowel is pretty much dead cente! r in what we call the 'vowel space'
>> -- the area in the mouth in which vowels are made by placing the
>> tongue high or low and pulling it forward or retracting it.
>>
>> Schwa isn't a phoneme of English; it is what we call an allophone.
>> An allophone is a particular way of pronouncing a phoneme (phonemes
>> are the sounds that we use to build words). We speak very rapidly --
>> at the rate of several phonemes per second. At the same time, the
>> movements we have to make with our tongues, vocal cords, and other
>> vocal-tract parts have to be precise enough to differentiate the
>> sounds we speak. In every language, a tradeoff is made between speed
>> and precise articulation of a phoneme, resulting in changes in how
>> the phoneme is pronounced. Sometimes a small change is made in the
>> phoneme; sometimes we get a whole different sound; sometimes the
>> phoneme is left out altogether.
>>
>> The app! earance of schwa depends on which syllables in the word are
>> accented -- emphasized more than the others (linguists call this
>> feature STRESS). English is a rhythmic language; the preferred
>> arrangement of syllables is in stressed-unstresssed pairs, as in
>> (stressed syllables are in CAPS) PHO-to-GRA-phic ('photographic').
>>
>> Schwa appears in syllables which have no stress at all. Any vowel
>> (except the diphthongs, the vowels in 'bite', 'bout', and 'Boyd')
>> will be pronounced as schwa if it appears in an unstressed syllable.
>> Hence the difference in the pair
>>
>> 1 - PHO-to-GRAPH 'photograph'
>>
>> 2 - pho-TO-gra-PHY 'photography'
>>
>> (English has two degrees of stress; the main stress -- on PHO- and
>> TO- in these examples -- and secondary stress, on GRAPH and PHY).
>>
>> Notice how PHO is pronounced with an /o/ in #1, but with a schwa
>> (somewhat like 'pu! h') in #2. Similarly, -TO- is pronounced something
>> like 'tuh' in #1, but as TAH in #2. Notice that the stress is
>> reversed in the pair: in #1, 'pho-' has the main stress and '-to-'
>> has no stress. In #2, the exact opposite holds: 'pho-' has no
>> stress, and '-to-' has the main stress.
>>
>> This holds for normal-speed speech. When we slow down or have to
>> speak unusually carefully (as in a noisy environment), we will
>> pronounce the full vowel.
>>
>> These rapid-speech changes happen to every sound we say. A
>> noticeable one is the various ways /t/ is pronounced: with a strong
>> puff of air in 'toe'; as a d-like sound (but it is not /d/) in
>> 'water'; as a break in the breath stream (a glottal stop) in
>> 'button' or 'kitten'; without the puff of air, as in 'store'. This
>> last causes /t/ and /d/ to sound the same, resulting in spelling
>> errors such as 'distain' for 'disdain' and ! 'next store' for 'next
>> door'. /t/ may also be omitted altogether when it is between an /n/
>> and a vowel or '-er': 'twenty' may be pronounced 'twenny' and
>> 'hunter' as 'hunner'.
>>
>> NOTE: These changes are not sloppy or incorrect speech, whatever you
>> may have been told by your singing teacher or anyone else. They are
>> necessary compromises between speed and precision articulation.
>> Every language has a large number of such changes; learning them is
>> necessary to acquiring a native accent in a language one is learning
>> (a common component of a foreign accent in learners of English is
>> the failure to change vowels to schwa).
>>
>> Dr. Johanna Rubba, Associate Professor, Linguistics
>> Linguistics Minor Advisor
>> English Department
>> California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo
>> E-mail: [log in to unmask]
>> Tel.: 805.756.2184
>> Dept. Ofc. Tel.: 805.756.2596
>> Dept. Fax: 805.756.6374
>> URL: http://www.cla.calpoly.edu/~jrubba
> <http://www.cla.calpoly.edu/%7Ejrubba>
>
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> Dr. Johanna Rubba, Associate Professor, Linguistics
> Linguistics Minor Advisor
> English Department
> California Polytechnic State Univers! ity, San Luis Obispo
> E-mail: [log in to unmask]
> Tel.: 805.756.2184
> Dept. Ofc. Tel.: 805.756.2596
> Dept. Fax: 805.756.6374
> URL: http://www.cla.calpoly.edu/~jrubba
> <http://www.cla.calpoly.edu/%7Ejrubba>
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Herb,
Besides the obvious /r/ insertion in "washing" that becomes "warshing,"
I don't know if anyone has done a formal study of /r/ insertion, yet I
have noticed it in three different dialects: those dialects in certain
parts of New England, New York City, and Appalachia. But I believe that
certain phonological conditions have to take place for the /r/ to be
inserted. In New England and New York City, the /r/ is inserted when
one word ends in a vowel and the next word begins with a vowel.
President Kennedy said "Cuber is," but didn't say "Spainer is." Someone
supposedly asked Kennedy where the /r/ in "Cuber" came from, and he
replied that it was the /r/ left out of "Hahvard." In Appalachian
speech, an /r/ is inserted if the word ends in "ow.' So it's "holler,"
tobaccer" and "swaller." (You probably already know all of this, but
other readers may not.)
/l/ insertion also takes place in Appalachian speech in "fillum" for
"film." I believe the spelling of "colonel" is also affected by /l/
insertion. Are there others?
Herb, while I have your attention, let me ask you a question. In
Appalachian speech and other parts of the United States, especially in
the South, the past tense of "take" is often given as "taken." "I taken
a job in the mines." But the past tense of "eat" is not given as
"eaten." *"I eaten my lunch this morning." Any ideas about why?
Marshall
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