Re: Iago, Mary-Land and schwa

["Carl L. Distefano" CLDistefano@xxxxxxxx]

** Reply to note from hickling@xxxxxxxx (Lee Hickling) Wed, 5 Feb 97 13:40:25 +0000

>   The prevailing modern pronunciation MARE-uh-lund displays the way
> strongly accented languages like English tend to relax the vowels in
> unaccented syllables into the sound linguists call schwa, pronounced uh.
> It's a trait that we share with speakers of Russian.
> 
> Lee Hickling            

Interesting observation. In Russian, the "relaxation" takes the form
of a systematic vowel shift, especially in A, E and O (both soft and
hard forms). Thus, unaccented "yah" (the famous backwards R) becomes
"yeh", "yaw" becomes "yah", while "yeh" shifts to
"yee". I have
to smile when native Russians insist that their spelling is "vpolnye
foneticheskoye" (completely phonetic - pron. "fpalNYEH
faniTEEchiskaye"). Well, yes -- if you know the rules.

I'm no linguist, but if I remember what Bill Labov taught me 25 years
ago, such "micro" vowel shifts have "macro" counterparts, across time
and geographic locations. Back then Labov (pron. "luh-BOVE") was
studying vowel shifts in English: it was fascinating to listen to his
field recordings of the various regional dialects. (The hardest, by far, to
decipher, was rural Texan.)

To relate this to XPL (sorry, but digressions of a literary or
linguistic nature are NOT off-topic -- not on a XyWrite list!), I have
a little program that temporarily remaps key assignments to characters
corresponding to Cyrillic letters when  (a TrueType font)
is invoked in XyWin. In other words, lets you alternate between
English and Cyrillic keyboards without changing .KBD files. Convenient
for producing bilingual texts. If anyone's interested, let me know.


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Carl Distefano * * * CLDistefano@xxxxxxxx
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