Talk:English-language vowel changes before historic /l/

From the old Talk:Salary-celery merger talk page

Many sentences in this article remind me of a post I originally made on this post. But I didn't actually write this article. (There's also a phrase that looks word-for-word from something by Brynmor Thomas who has published on the New Zealand merger.) Please don't do that again—ask first! —Felix the Cassowary (ɑe hɪː jɐ) 14:42, 1 October 2005 (UTC)

• Is the stereotype that Australians in other states without the merger often reverse /{l/ and /el/ true?

64.200.124.189 15:51, 1 October 2005 (UTC)

"However, due to the very small number of people participating in the study the results cannot be considered convincing." This needs justification, not just peremptory declaration that the results "cannot be considered convincing." At least relax the claim to something along the lines of "some scholars judge that..." and then cite them. 68.99.193.145 (talk) 21:57, 23 January 2016 (UTC)

Other Vic-NZ shared features?

The article has just been changed to say that the salary/celery merger is one of few changes, rather than the only change, NZ and Vic have in common that the rest of Oz skips. What are the others? I can't think of any, but then, as a Victorian I mightn't notice them. Is this just a rewording to make the statement less absolute, rather than an actual acknowledgement of change? —Felix the Cassowary (ɑe hɪː jɐ) 04:40, 2 October 2005 (UTC)

Wrong symbol?

I'm 99% sure that the phonetic symbol that should be here is /ɛ/, not /e/, and am changing the article accordingly. 151.196.55.136 22:18, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

Because the front vowels of Australian English are generally higher than those of British or American English, /e/ is standardly used. See Australian English phonology for discussion and references. --Angr (t·c) 22:19, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

There you go. That's 1% of doubt for you. Same goes for NZE ... actually more so for them. Jimp 22Dec05

From the old Talk:Foot-goose and full-fool mergers page

Rubbish! AusE foot is [fʊt] whilst AusE goose is [gʉs]. The distinction is both length & position. Jimp 21Dec05

You've misread it. It was talking about /ʉː/ before /l/, where for many Australians (at least) the position is nearly merged & length becomes the primary or only queue. I've clarified the para (I hope) and removed the dubious template. —Felix the Cassowary (ɑe hɪː jɐ) 13:29, 21 December 2005 (UTC)

I see. Jimp 22Dec05

From Golf-gulf merger

I'm moving all this here in case it's deleted. User:Jimp 22Dec05 If it's decided that this should be kept then I suggest merging Golf-gulf merger here. Jimp 07:22, 29 December 2005 (UTC)

Article:Golf-gulf merger

The golf-gulf merger is a conditioned vowel merger that occurs in some varieties of Australian English that causes /ɐl/ as in gull to merger with /ɔl/ as in doll when it occurs before a consonant, making gulf and golf homophones, that occurs in some variaties of Australian English. The merger does not occur when /ɐl/ and /ɔl/ occur at the end of a word, so dull and doll are still distinct as [dɐl] and [dɔl], but golf and gulf are merged as [gɔlf]. In some other varieties of Australian English /ɐl/ before a consonant merges with /əʉl/ instead of /ɔl/ making 'culture' sound like coal-ture, but hull and hole are still distinct because the /ɐl/ and /əʉl/ occur at the end of a word rather than before a consonant.

An exception to both these mergers before a consonant sound is when the consonant sound occurs across a morpheme boundary, as in gulls, which usually remains being pronounced [gɐlz].

A similar but reverse merger occurs in some forms of New Zealand English, particularly in the North Island. In this, it is the sound /ɔ/ that is being lost, replaced by /ɐ/. It is notable in words like warrior, which in some instances is indistinguishable from worrier.

But worry (and therefore worrier) can have /ɔ/ (the LOT vowel) in New Zealand. It's a spelling pronunciation. Are you sure it's not the other way around? Mr KEBAB (talk) 07:25, 11 October 2017 (UTC)

Talk:Golf-gulf merger

Are there any words besides gulf subject to this so-called merger? And can anyone provide published evidence of the existence of it? --Angr/_{tɔk tə mi} 2 July 2005 20:06 (UTC)

Yes: multiply; pulse; bulk; culture (as the article says) etc. In general, any monomorphemic word with the sequence /ɐ/ + /l/ + consonant. No. — Felix the Cassowary 05:02, 19 August 2005 (UTC)

Also cult and colt. I believe it's real. Felix and I both being Aussies have it. However, I don't have any published evidence on hand and without that I'd have to say it should perhaps go. Jimp 06:31, 21 December 2005 (UTC)

map

A map for comparing the fill-feel and full-foolmergers would be a greataddition to this article. Circeus 23:25, 2 January 2006 (UTC)

Yolk-Yoke Merger?

I've heard the word "yolk" both pronounced with the letter L in it and without, almost exactly like the word "yoke", but with a bit more lip-curling (I think that's it.. I haven't studied phonology too much), almost as if the lips were curling to form a W sound before the K.

I've also noticed some people pronouncing "poke" and "polka" similarly, as well as "folk."

I haven't found these items on Wikipedia and was wondering if they should be added someplace on this page.

This isn't really a merger. The "l" sound in "yolk", "polka" and "folk" was lost long ago. Some people may pronounced "yolk" with an "l" today, but that would be a spelling pronunciation. I've added a section about it at phonological history of English consonants. Voortle 23:56, 16 June 2006 (UTC)

Unreferenced Mention of Victorian Usage of Salary / Celery

From article: "The salary-celery merger is a conditioned merger of /æ/ (as in bat) and /e/ (as in bet) when they occur before /l/, thus making salary and celery homophones.[1][2][3]

This merger occurs in the English spoken in New Zealand and the Australian state of Victoria. "

There are no references for the latter statement in this article. I have deleted the statement. Please add a referenced version if you can find it.

Note also that reference 2 above is a 404.

It is too referenced at the end of the paragraph, ie, as by Cox & Palethorpe, 2003. 203.220.171.69 12:04, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

I have mentioned this issue and this external publication in this other discussion, and I have specified that Cox and Palethorpe's testing utilised just one group of Victorian speakers: 13 fifteen-year-old girls from the same school in Wangaratta. If we are going to use it as a reference in an article that makes claims about all of Victoria, it's fair to point out that this study tested just one homogenous group in one small regional area of Victoria, with no one in Melbourne or surrounding areas being tested. Asa01 23:23, 16 December 2006 (UTC)

salary-celery merger original research

This bit sounds a bit like original research to me: It is one of the very few features that New Zealand and Victoria share that the rest of Australia doesn't also share with New Zealand.

This article lays out what Cox and Palethorpe discovered. By this further synthesis of those findings seems like it is getting into murky OR territory. Asa01 00:11, 17 December 2006 (UTC)

Los Angeles South Bay

This is definitely happening in Southern California. I've noticed it since starting to hang around with people from the South Bay (Torrance, Carson, etc.). I'll get the phonetic transcription soon, but for now I'll just say that they say "tal" instead of "tell"; "Hallen" instead of "Helen"; "allay" instead of "ellay" for "LA"; etc.

I haven't done any formal research, but I have a Masters degree in linguistics, so I know more or less what I'm talking about. Is anyone interested in studying this? Can anyone recommend what I should do to study it properly?

Forgot who I was. Jerry 15:07, 4 May 2007 (UTC)

This is California Vowel Shift. The lowering of (I'm using X-Sampa here) /E/ to /{/, especially after /l/ or dark-l /5/. Very common in SoCal actually. --190.0.133.177 (talk) 07:31, 13 March 2008 (UTC)

"chulldren"

Should there be a mention somewhere of the seemingly ever more common pronunciation, in BrE at least, of the word children as "chulldren" (first syllable rhyming with "pull"). Listening to a radio documentary about education on the BBC some time ago I was struck by the number of contributors -- not least, the "child care professionals" -- using this pronunciation. Anyone know of any references to this phenomenon? -- Picapica (talk) 18:37, 18 May 2008 (UTC)

Good point! It’s true that very many people mispronounce it like that. I think some Americans may do so too. It should be looked into. — Chameleon 07:16, 16 January 2010 (UTC)

vile-vial merger

Dictionaries list "vile" as a monosyllable, but "vial" as a disyllable. But as an approximate RP speaker, I pronounce these as homophones. Similarly "mile" rhymes with "dial" for me. How about a section on this? Mark314159 (talk) 03:08, 6 January 2009 (UTC)

I had read about a real-reel merger somewhere... but unfortunately there's a band called "Reel 2 Real" which makes Google useless in finding that page. --A. di M. (formerly Army1987) — Deeds, not words. 16:50, 11 May 2009 (UTC)

It seems to me that this merger is complete. All such words have a slight schwa after the diphthong. They all have one and half syllables, if you will.  :-) Something similar applies to flour-flower, dire-dyer, etc. A person would have to be really thinking about the spelling to make a distinction in pronunciation. — Chameleon 07:23, 16 January 2010 (UTC)

A vile-vial merger is not unique to RP (or approximate RP), or even to BrE. It exists in the transitionary area between Inland Northern American English and Northeast Pennsylvania English.mcornelius (talk) 23:20, 6 May 2010 (UTC)

Are there any published sources referring to this as the "vile-vial merger"? +Angr 06:12, 7 May 2010 (UTC)

Broken links

Reference 8, http://www.ling.upenn.edu/phonoatlas/Atlas_chapters/Ch9/Ch9.html, no longer exists, but it is still available from the Internet Archive, at http://web.archive.org/web/20061028164228/http://www.ling.upenn.edu/phonoatlas/Atlas_chapters/Ch9/Ch9.html, as well as earlier versions. Mark314159 (talk) 02:07, 12 January 2009 (UTC)

• I have now made this correction to the article. Mark314159 (talk) 00:30, 7 June 2009 (UTC)
• I have also changed references 2, 3, and 5, Cox and Palethorpe papers, to point to Internet Archive copies - there are some problems with loading these PDFs, but they are better than dead links. Mark314159 (talk) 01:57, 7 June 2009 (UTC)

Doll/dole merger

Surely this merger is not confined to Londoners? Afaik it's pretty widespread in Australian English. Me, I only distinguish them in careful speech. Poll/pole is the same. Roll/role I would never distinguish. (OTOH col/coal I would never merge). Stevage 12:36, 1 February 2011 (UTC)

In most accents of English, doll doesn't rhyme with poll and role, though. Doll has the LOT vowel (/ɒ/ in RP), while poll, pole, roll, role, and coal all have the GOAT vowel (/əʊ/ in RP). There are actually very few words that end in /ɒl/ in a word-final stressed syllable; see wikt:Rhymes:English:-ɒl. —Angr (talk) 20:58, 1 February 2011 (UTC)

Interesting. My point wasn't that there isn't normally a distinction, but that the merger isn't confined to London - afaik. Stevage 23:17, 3 February 2011 (UTC)

My point was just that doll/dole is the only one of the pairs you mentioned that isn't normally homophonous anyway. AFAIK everyone merges poll/pole and everyone merges roll/role. If the exact pair doll/dole is merged in Australian English, then yes, the merger isn't confined to London. But we'd still need a reliable source showing the merger in Australia to add it to the article. —Angr (talk) 23:25, 4 February 2011 (UTC)

Interesting. I could be wrong, but I would have thought around here the poll/pole distinction was made more frequently than doll/dole. (Ok, took a survey, N=1, turns out I'm wrong.) But yes, I don't have any sources, so I guess this isn't going anywhere. :) Stevage 09:00, 6 February 2011 (UTC)

Make that N=2 and my input is that doll and dole are perfectly homophonous. I really wish we had some reliable sources to back this up, but I suppose most readers will realise the mistake anyway, just from their own experience. D4g0thur 11:56, 31 July 2012 (UTC)

Call-Cool merger

I've noticed this merger in my own dialect of Australian English but despite all my attempts, I haven't turned up anything on it. If anyone knows of any scholarship on it, I'd like to see it added to the page... if no such works exist, perhaps I should go back to university and do a paper on it myself. D4g0thur 11:51, 31 July 2012 (UTC)

I agree with this merger, I'm from near Cambridge in the UK. /kɔːl/ sounds a little posh to me strangely. I've also been trying to find out if there's a reason for this merger. 79.75.108.102 (talk) 11:14, 21 August 2013 (UTC)

Also agree. Call-cool, fall-fool, etc. I think this is an alteration to the standard pronunciation of 'all' in general.

"fool-fall" type mergers, or near-mergers, are discussed in the following blog post: http://englishspeechservices.com/blog/people-fool-in-love-extended/ I may work on adding it to the article in the future if I have time. Urszag (talk) 01:43, 19 October 2017 (UTC)

L-vocalization

I'm going to copy most of the English section of L-vocalization to this article because it falls under the subject of this article and the article seems incomplete without it. If anyone has an objection, let me know. _{(suoı̣ʇnqı̣ɹʇuoɔ · ʞlɐʇ)} nɯnuı̣ɥԀ 20:18, 10 June 2014 (UTC)

Other: l̩

Why does the Other section list "l̩" under IPA for all the words? That's not how the IPA actually lists those words. Helping end world sexual repression. (talk) 05:00, 11 October 2017 (UTC)

The source (Labov, Ash & Boberg 2006:73) doesn't necessarily say that the four mergers are happening concurrently or mention the resulting vowel quality of each merger. So I suspect whoever instated the "Homophonous pairs" table was misguided. Nardog (talk) 05:27, 11 October 2017 (UTC)

The doll-dole merger.

It is stated within the article that:

Where the /l/ is not word-final, however, the distinction is not recoverable. That may lead to sold having the same vowel sound as solve as well as hypercorrections such as /səʊlv/ for solve (RP /sɒlv/). There do not appear to be any minimal pairs in this environment since RP /ɒl/ and /əʊl/ are in more-or-less complementary distribution in stressed syllables, with /ɒl/ before /f/ and /v/ (e.g. golf, dolphin, solve, revolve) and /əʊl/ elsewhere (e.g. bolt, polka, gold, soldier, holster).

This does not appear to be entirely true. Yes, it could be said that /ɒl/ and /əʊl/ are in more-or-less complementary distribution in stressed syllables, but there are too many exceptions to treat that as a rule. Moreover, one such anomaly, the word polka, is mentioned as a supposed example of compliance with this principle, even though it most palpably is not. Other exceptions I can think of include solder, Volga, eschscholtzia, doldrums, dolman and molto. Despite a statement to the contrary within the cited section, there even seems to be a minimal pair in this environment: volt (the unit, pronounced /ˈvoʊlt/) and volte (in fencing or as part of volte-face, pronounced /ˈvɒlt/). Could we fix the aforesaid inaccuracies? Maciuf (talk) 15:48, 27 October 2022 (UTC)