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So maybe it's me
On the way to Chicago Midway Buffy announced that we needed to make a pit stop. I sighed and muttered an of course to Dave who was starting to recognize how often Buffy needs to stop when travelling. I compared her to a thimble and she shot back in her own defense: I drank way more than you guys do!
Don't you mean you drank more than we did?
I asked. And I realized that I had misheard. Again. Last time she said drank /dɹæŋk/ and I heard 'drink' because she probably says something like [dɹe̝ŋk] (the uptack below the 'e' indicates a raised articulation). A diacritic doesn't tell us specifically how high the vowel is and I'm starting to think that perhaps Buffy's [e̝] is pretty much identical to her /ɪ/.
Of course I can stand on no conclusion regarding her vowel distribution. I can't make a judgment like that based on two misheard tokens. This is not how questions are answered, this is how they are raised. So my question: has Buffy completely merged /æ/ and /ɪ/ before ŋ?
I have at the very least some evidence that she has merged them enough so that I have confused each for the other. Well either she's saying them the same or I need to start listening more carefully.
If my adventist great-grandpa was right, Buffy's gonna live to be like 120 for dranking more water than the rest of us...
ReplyDeleteexcept it's never water that she drinks. it's diet coke. or a latte. or crystal lite. or red bull. or some other kidney killer.
ReplyDeleteSorry but can you tell me where to get more crisp, high-res pictures of American road signs? They're hard to find on the Internet because of copyright issues; Wikipedia has pages and pages of German road signs but nothing for America.
ReplyDeletep.s. I think I've noticed a change in the captcha system: since about a week ago, they're suddenly giving us pronouncible words instead of total letterspam. I like it.
here's a page with a whole bunch of *.gifs of signs.
ReplyDeleteI just did a google image search for "merge" and the wikimedia commons page came up. it was a 600X600 image so i just used 'preview' on the mac to shrink it down to 180 or so.
probably most important, it's a *.png file instead of a *.jpg. I used to use *.gif files but they don't work well with blogger for some reason. *.gif files lose their transparency for some reason and sometimes don't even upload.
I too have noticed the captcha change. I too like it.
Wow. Thank you incredibly much. I have been to that very site before, but the last time I checked there were only very small, inferior-looking pictures there. It's definitely better now.
ReplyDeleteIn case you're wondering, I'm using the images to make T-shirts.
There's a slightly different vowel shift in Mississippi, that I don't know how to write out phonetically. Someone might say, "What are you dranking?" But the "a" is one long drawn-out vowel. You can feel the hot stench of Budweiser coming out of the word. To me, the midwest vowel shift has a catch in the middle of the vowel: "But I dra-ank more than you guys."
ReplyDelete