- An Outline of English Phonetics, 4th ed. (New York, 1934), pp. 227–8.
- American Pronunciation, 10th ed. (Ann Arbor, 1951), p. 91.
- Ibid., p. 81.
- Language 29.420 (1953). Twaddell draws his quotations from: Leonard Bloomfleld, Language (New York, 1933), p. 90; Bernard Bloch and George L. Trager, Outline of Linguistic Analysis (Baltimore, 1942), p. 35 and 47; Kenneth L. Pike, Phonemies, p. 63 and 250; George L. Trager and Henry Lee Smith, Jr., Outline of English Structure, p. 35; and Robert A. Hall, Jr. Leave Your Language Alone!, p. 75.
- Stanley S. Newman, On the Stress System of English, Word 2.171 (1946)
- Lee S. Hultzén, Vowel Quality in Unstressed Syllables in American English. Quarterlg Journal of Speech 29.451 (1943).
- Edward Sapir, Language (New York, 1921), p. 36.
- Bloomfleld, pp. 110–1; Bloch and Trager, p. 35; Hultzén, p. 451. The latter, however, explicitly excludes energy of articulation from his definition of stress, as does C. K. Thomas in his An Introduction to the Phonetics of American English (New York, 1947), pp. 109–110.
- Bloch and Trager, p. 35.
- Giles W. Gray and Claude M. Wise, The Bases of Speech (New York and London, 1934), p. 78.
- Robert H. Randall, An Introduction to Acoustics (Cambridge, Mass., 1951).
- Daniel Jones, The Phoneme: Its Nature and Its Use (Cambridge, England, 1950), p. 40.
- Ibid. p. 59.
- In Trager-Smith terms, /ǝ/, of course=[∧] and /ǝ/.=[ǝ] The fact that they have different stress marks for secondary and tertiary stresses is of no concern to us here.
- Outline, p. 93. Many other examples are scattered thruout the book.
- Bloomfield, p. 112; Hultzén, pp. 453–4.
- Kenyon, pp. 84–5; Bloch-Trager, p. 48; Trager-Smith, p. 67.
- Kenyon, p. 91.
- Typical treatment is found in Bloch and Trager, p. 50 (their example is advantageous); also Newman, pp. 186–7 (his closest example is retardation).
- This adds stress to the already overflowing reservoir of “ticklish” terms word, syllable, vowel, consonant, phoneme.
- The most disagreements can be shown to revolve around vowel quality, stress or lack of it affects consonants, too. See the discussion and accompanying spectrograms in Potter, Kopp, and Green, Visible Speech (New York, 1947), pp. 51–3.
- Certain controversial vowels, such as /i/ and /o/, posited as phonemes by Trager-Smith and others, are neither included nor excluded here. The discussion of their status is merely left in abeyance, pending completion of such analyses as the present one.
- Morris Swadesh seems to have been the first to note that the vowel groups /ii/, /ou/ and /uu/ (Swadesh's phonemic transcription) may alternate with /ǝj/ and /ǝw/ in such words as piano, Iowa, and silhouette, i.e. /piiænou/ or /pǝjænou/, etc. See his article On the Analysis of English Syllables, Language 23.149 (1947).
- Kenyon calls attention to such a centralizing effect only in the case of [o] in follow, sparrow, swallow. (Kenyon uses [o] to represent both monophthongal and diphthongal versions of the vowel. He writes [ö] to represent the centralized quality, which he describes as being fairly close to a weak [u], and without lip-rounding, to [ǝ]—pp. 192–3.)
- For [I] and its behavior in New York City speech, see Allan F. Hubbell, The Pronunciation of English in New York City (New York, 1950), pp. 88–90 and 146; also by the same author, The Phonemic Analysis of Unstressed Vowels, American Speech (May 1950). Most of Hubbell's description applies to the northern and eastern urban types of American speech which form the basis of this paper.
- Without syncope.
- American pronunciation with two full vowels.
- For purposes of readability and practical considerations of printing, Russian words are transliterated here into the Latin alphabet. In both the transliteration and transcription, the apostrophe is used to indicate palatalization.
- Or even [s∧ma], especially in Leningrad or Leningrad-influenced pronunciation: Boyanus, A Manual of Russian Pronunciation (London, 1946), p. 36.
- Not to be confused with the phonetic term of articulatory placement.
- A Manual of Russian Pronunciation (London, 1946). Boyanus uses a subscript i to indicate palatalization.
- Obviously, Russians have great difficulty with the different distribution of vowels in English. See Marshall D. Berger, The American English Pronunciation of Russian Immigrants, Columbia diss., Univ. of Michigan Microfilms (1951), pp. 112–184.
- Cf. N. S. Trubetzkoy, Principes de Phonologie (translation by J. Cantineau, Paris, 1949), p. 243.
- Muncie is a city in the state of Indiana.
- “Roots” in Bloomfleld's terminology. See Language, pp. 240–6.
- One slight hedge must be made here. In certain phonic dialects there are vowel-consonant combinations which cannot occur in less than a two-vowel sequence. For instance, in most eastern seaboard American English and in British English, the sequence [er] of error cannot stand alone. This example is drawn from J. D. O'Connor and J. L. M. Trim, Vowel, Consonant, and Syllable, Word 9.120 (1953).
- Trager-Smith, p. 66, present the same idea, tho not in terms of vowel occurrence alone.
- There is a distinct advantage in using conventional orthography for these illustrations instead of transcription. Spelling can be read by any native speaker of English according to his own phonic dialect without affecting the essentials of this article and without committing the writer to any particular variety of American English among those treated here.
- Some modern dictionaries use a system based on this principle. For example, the Thorndike-Barnhart dictionaries re-spell sufficient as (sǝflshǝnt). fish is of course our univocalic mold, and the other vowels are parasitic schwas.
- These phrases should be read fluently without any pause between the separate elements. The phonetic value of the word a and ˌer (representing her) is schwa in all connected discourse. See discussion of “weak forms” beginning above.
- Etta Keti, Dinah Mite and Aunt Tenna are comic strip or comic feature characters.
- Chip 'n Dale are a pair of chipmunk characters in Walt Disney's books for children.
- The K-9 Corps trained dogs for war duties during War II.
- Extended discussions of these alternations are found in all standard works on English phonetics. See also Hultzén, The Pronunciation of Monosyllabic Form-Words in American English, Studies in Speech and Drama in honor of Alexander M. Drummond, pp. 254–284.
- Language, pp. 186–7.
- The sequences gramma phone (gramma variant form of grandma) and tell a phone are identical in structure with gramophone and telephone.
- For still another pun on telephone, I am greatly indebted to Professor Judah A. Joffe: “The three best forms of communication are telephone, telegraph and tell a woman.”
- Cf. A. A. Hill's incisive remark, Language 29.559 (1953), review of Kökeritz's Shakespearean Pronunciation: “…word plays apparently demand a like syllabic structure, independently of the number of like phonemes. »
- Knock-knock is a punning game played by two persons.
- A term coined by Otto Jespersen, Language, pp. 169–171.
- -rama has the meaning of “wide, all-encompassing view”; Cine-rama is a type of wide curved screen motion picture technique; -teria means “self-service”; a gasateria is a place where you fill your car with gasoline yourself, -thon means “endurance contest”; a talka-thon usually refers to a filibuster in the U. S. Senate.
- -phibious has been given the meaning that -bious (from Greek bios—life) would have if the coinage were a scientific, instead of a popular, one. Tri-phibious was a designation given during the last war to those specially trained combat men who could, fight on the land, on the sea, and in the air. -burger has the connotation of “something in a bun”; a cheeseburger is made by placing a slice of American cheese on a hamburger pattie and then grilling them together in a bun.
- Incidentally, the author declines any responsibility for the entertainment value of any of the puns or punning coinages cited in this paper.
- Most important works of all are Jones' The Phoneme, pp. 134–152 and Kenyon's remarks in Webster's Guide lo Pronunciation, pp. xxxiv–xxxvii. See also the appropriate sections in Jones' Outline of English Phonetics and Kenyon's American Pronunciation.
- See Twaddell, Stetson's Model and the Supra-segmental Phonemes, Language 29.425 (1953). Twaddell raises important questions about the failure of Bloch- Trager and Trager-Smith to integrate the various acoustic properties into a unified structural pattern: terms like sonority, audibility, syllabicity tend to be left hanging in mid-air.
- Function, Structure, and Sound Change, Word 8.28 (1952).
- Ibid., p. 29.
- There are of course, a number of cases where one radical loses its full vowel: chairm'n, mainl'nd. Other cases vacillate regionally: cran-berry (Amer.) vs. cranb'ry (Brit.); milk-man (Amer.) vs. milkm'n (Brit.): no-body vs. nob'dy (vacillation both in Britain and U. S. A.). The apostrophe is used here as an orthographic device indicating either a schwa or complete elision of the original vowel.
- Guide to Pronunciation, p. xxxvii, and American Pronunciation, p. 91.
- Guide, p. xxxvii.
- See ftn. 23 for references to A. F. Hubbell's works.
- O'Connor and Trim, op. cit., p. 122. To be sure, syllable boundaries are not always easy to draw, but this is more of a consonantal problem than a vocalic one. A better term than phonemic syllable might be functional syllable. Such are the univocalic molds and parasitic sequences, which can usually be isolated from larger utterances, even before any kind of formal phonemic analysis.
- Bloomfleld, p. 80.
- We are still faced with the problem of expressing these concepts in other languages. For the time being, at least, we had best restrict our terminological deliberations to the English field.
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