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Re: English IPA transcription of "er" vs "rer"

Subject: Re: English IPA transcription of "er" vs "rer"
From:
Date: 29 Aug 2006 18:51:16 -0700
Newsgroups: sci.lang, alt.english.usage, alt.usage.english
Bart Mathias wrote:
>
> I had a student from Baltimore once who said "murderer" in a way that
> sounded like "murder" to me.
>
> Until I saw Nathan Sanders' reply to this query, I had always vaguely
> assumed that a "rer" would result from the same sort of relaxation and
> re-exertion (probably not the proper phonetics term) that made "ye"
> /yIy/ and "woo" /wUw/ possible,

The word mirror is even worse. In my idiolect, so far as I can tell,
there are four successive "r"s. The first one is differentiated by
belonging to the first syllable; the last three are two "tense" "r'"s
separated by a "lax" "r". All of these I make humped and without any
lip motion.

I say "tense" and "lax" but I don't really understand what I am doing.
It's all done down in the throat, so it may be pharyngeal.

But don'r generalize from my idiolect. Most people think I say "mirror
in a very odd way.


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