Vowels FOOT

The FOOT vowel  was rather more frequent in the older East Anglian dialect than in General English (Wells 1982). Middle English  and /ou/ remain distinct in the northern dialects e.g. road /ru:d/, rowed /rΛud/ . However, there has been a strong tendency in East Anglia for the /u:/ descended from Middle English  to be shortened to  in closed syllables. Thus road can rhyme with good, and we find pronunciations such as in toad, home, stone, coat  . This shortening does not normally occur before /l/, so coal is /ku:l/. The shortening process has clearly been a productive one. Norwich, for example, until the 1960s had a theatre known as The Hippodrome , and trade names such as Kodachrome can be heard with pronunciations such as . The feature thus survives quite well in modern speech, but a number of words appear to have been changed permanently to the /u:/ set as a result of lexical transfer. Trudgill (1974) showed that 29 different lexemes from this set occurred with .

The vowel  also occurs in roof, proof, hoof and their plurals, e.g.  . It also occurs in middle-class sociolects in room, broom; working-class sociolects tend to have the GOOSE vowel in these items.

In the older dialect, a number of FOOT words derived from Middle English /o:/ plus shortening followed the same route as blood and flood and had /Λ/ : soot, roof /sΛt , rΛf/ .

مواضيع ذات صلة

Spelling and Pronunciation SUMMARY

American English vs. British English

Morphological Basis of English Spelling

Phoneme–Grapheme Correspondences in English Vowels

Phoneme–Grapheme Correspondences in English Consonants

Spelling and Pronunciation Irregularity of English Spelling

Structural Factors in Second Language Phonology SUMMARY

Perception

Optimality Theory (OT)

Ontogeny Phylogeny Model (OPM)

Markedness

Hypercontrast