Re: The Next Step (was Vulcan in Vulcan)
Saul Epstein 
Thu, 23 Oct 1997 10:43:19 -0500

At 04:13 PM 10/23/97 MET_DST, Maggie wrote:

>I thought /ee/ would be like in the English word "eerie" (as in weird,
>uncanny), it is the British (IMHO) that pronounce "there" as th/ai/(r).

Well, no, not in modern English. (As always, some dialects are bound to be
different.) "Eerie" is pronounced /iri/ or /iirii/ or /irii/ or /iiri/,
depending on the words around it, dialect, and how much of a hurry the
speaker is in. Long ago it was probably pronounced /eerih/, where /h/ is a
fricative near the <ch> in German "ich" -- but that would have been before
the Great English Vowel Shift, in which about half the occurances of each
vowel rose a notch in the mouth, giving new importance to soon-to-be-silent
final <e>s and driving future students of English temporarily insane.

In case this is the problem: many of us were told as children that there is
a "short e" in words like "bet" and a "long e" in words like "discrete." But
it's important to realize that, phonetically, the English grammarian's "long
e" is actually an /i/. The "long a" is actually /ei/; the "short a" is
actually /=E6/ (that's an ae ligature, if the character doesn't transmit);
that the "short" i,u, and o are not necessarily any shorter than the long
ones but are lower in the mouth.

Just think: once upon a time, English pronunciation conformed to its
spelling almost as closely as Spanish...

So, in really crisp, "proper" British, "there" is pronounced /the^/ and
"thereon," /theron/. Notice that the non-silent <e> in "there" was NOT hit
by the vowel shift, which would have produced /thi^/, rhyming with "here."
Consistency is the hobgoblin...

--
from Saul Epstein
liberty <at> uit <dot> net
www <dot> johnco <dot> cc <dot> ks <dot> us <slash> <tilde> sepstein
"Surak ow'pha:per the's'hi the's'cha'; the's'pha:dzhar the's'hi surakecha'."
					-- K'dvarin Ursw~l'at