Accent game

[cactuswatcher]

My particular dialect of English has 12 vowels. That's a little interesting because a) the book I have on American English Linguistics claims most American dialects of English have 9 vowels, and b) because I speak what's pretty close to "American Standard." If you look up English dialects on Wikipedia (the article is actually called List of Dialects of English Language) you'll find a subsection called Midland American English and below that the dialects North Midlands, St. Louis and South Midlands. Though I grew up in the St. Louis region, I don't have a St. Louis accent. That's because it should properly be called a South St. Louis or St. Louis German accent. Only a minority of people in St. Louis talk like that. What I speak is North Midlands. South Midlands is what we used to disparagingly call Ozarkian, Hill Billy, Okie, Appalachian and so forth. It has a distinctive twang to it. It's often heard in "country music." North Midlands these days is the 900 pound gorilla of American accents. You are much more likely a job as a TV announcer if you speak North Midland than any other accent. North Midlands seems to be displacing a lot of the beautiful accents of the South and West, so that much of what you can read about American accents is rapidly going out of date.

At any rate, on to what I really wanted to discuss. Linguists distinguish individual phonemes of a language by what is known as minimal pairs. You change one and only one element of a word and see if you get a different valid word. For consonants you might have something like cat-cap. Not too surprisingly 't' and 'p' represent separate phonemes of English. For the vowels you might have something like mate-mat, where the e is silent and has no effect other than to tell us how to pronounce the letter 'a'. What I think are more interesting are possible minimal dozens. That is a dozen words which form a set of minimal pairs for all of the vowels. Honestly, I don't think there are any. But I can come close. My vowels are long a as in ate, short a as in at, long e as in eat, short e as in ebb, long i as in ice, short i as in is, "schwa" sound as u in up, long o as in oak, short oo as in book, long oo as in moon, short o sound as in odd or father, and finally "aw" sound as in awl or tall. English has a tendency to treat diphthongs like pure vowels. So long i is technically a diphthong, but for historical reasons is validly treated like an English vowel. The "Aw" on the other hand may look like a diphthong in print but it's a pure vowel when spoken. It's very much the short o with more rounded lips.

Take
Tack
Teak
Tech
Tick
Tyke
Tuck
Token (not a minimal pair but, as close as I can come to real word with the same environment)
Took
------ (Place holder for a word with t+long oo+k)
Tock (is it even a word?)
Talk


Lake
Lack
Leak
Lecture (not minimal)
Lick
Like
Luck
Local (another miss)
Look
Luke
Lock
----- (place holder for a word with l+"aw"+k)

Kate
Cat
----- (long e missing)
Kettle (a miss)
Kit
Kite
cut
coat
----- (short oo missing)
coot
cot
caught (there are American dialects that don't distinguish in sound between cot and caught)

Can you come up with a complete set (any combination of consonants) for the vowels in your dialect?

Comments

[anomster.livejournal.com]

I think I have the same vowel phonemes you do.

"Token (not a minimal pair but, as close as I can come to real word with the same environment)" What's wrong w"toke"? Is it over the line? @>) And I'd say "tock" is a word; it goes w"tick." Can't get it any closer, though--I don't know of any word like "tuke."

Do you think of [iu] as a single vowel in English? It would let you add "cute" to your 3rd list.

My own 1st attempt was:

Bakes
Backs
Beaks
Becks (if you can treat "beck," as in "beck & call," as a countable noun--hey, M-W says it's also a British word for "creek"! (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/beck))
Bikes
Bics
Bokes (well, we only had 1 Boke on the ATPo board--do proper names count?)
Box (this is why all the others are plural or 3rd person singular!)
Rebukes (not minimal)
Books
Balks

Actually, this one works even better--it gives me all but 1:

Bait
Bat
Beat/Beet
Bet
Bit
Bite/Byte
Boat
‘Bot
Boot
Beaut/Butte
_____ (something that rhymes w/put)
Bought

...& when I got to "Bit," it made me think of Marjie...I didn't think of that when I started.

[cactuswatcher.livejournal.com]

I didn't claim "toke" because, it's slang/jargon and it seems to have faded from the widespread use it once had. If others wanted to claim it I wouldn't object. I'm a little uneasy about names, especially product names. I rejected Bic and Boke when I was doing that same group you did, but "Luke" is familiar enough and has been around long enough I let it in.

"Coot" is better than "cute" for my purposes. Most linguists would say that the "I" in "iu" is a semivowel which makes "coot and "cute" minimal pairs but not "cot" and "cute".

You forgot "bucks" in the top list and "but" in the bottom. ;o)

[anomster.livejournal.com]

I can understand about proper/product names.

On "cute," I was thinking that English treats [iu] as a single sound & that dictionaries call it "long u," much as our "long a" is really the diphthong [ei] (& similarly for "i" & even "o" as pronounced by most US English speakers).

Funny, I included "bucks" & "but" when I was making the lists in my head, but I completely forgot them when I wrote out the lists here! Still haven't come up w/a complete set.