User talk:Dermotmacflann: Difference between revisions

:As for whether the "u" in Nabooru is a strong vowel or a week vowel, broad English transcriptions generally don't distinguish this in final vowels.  {{IPA|i}} (<small>HAPPY</small>) vs. {{IPA|iː}} (<small>FLEECE</small>) ''are'' traditionally distinguished because they actually differ in some accents (Scotland in particular), but final {{IPA|u}} vs. {{IPA|uː}} aren't distinguished at the ends of words because practically no natively-spoken accent of English treats these as separate ''phonemes'' which can be assigned separate lexical set terms.  So there's a <small>GOOSE</small> vowel, but no separate <small>HINDU</small> vowel, if that makes sense.  A lax {{IPA|u}} ''can'' theoretically exist word internally, and I like to non-standardly call this the <small>MINUET</small> vowel ({{IPA|ˌmɪnjuˈɛt}}), which can have a lax realization, <span class="IPA">[ˌmɪnjʊˈɛt]</span>.  But if you speak the vowel at the end of a word, in pause, it does not really differ from the tense version of the vowel.  Some people to say <small>HAPPY</small> ({{IPA|ˈhæpi}}) more narrowly as <span class="IPA">[ˈhæpɪ]</span>, but how many people pronounce "Hindu" {{IPA|ˈhɪnduː}} more narrowly as <span class="IPA">[ˈhɪndʊ]</span>?  I'm going to guess hardly any native accent of English has this as a ''feature''.  The meta-vowel {{IPA|i}} exists because some accents tense it to <span class="IPA">[iː]</span> while other accents lax it to <span class="IPA">[ɪ]</span> or even <span class="IPA">[e]</span> (again, Scotland), separately from {{IPA|iː}}, even at the ends of words.  The same can't really be said of {{IPA|u}} vs. {{IPA|uː}} at the ends of words. - [[User:Dermotmacflann|Dermotmacflann]] ([[User talk:Dermotmacflann|talk]]) 00:03, 15 April 2017 (UTC)