If you asked me whether "morning" and "mourning" are pronounced the same, I would unhesitatingly tell you that yes, they are.
But I pronounce them differently. I pronounce mourning a bit lower, with something of a dipthong.
I'm pretty sure I'm not supposed to be doing this. As I recall (and correct me if I'm wrong) there are only two dipthongs in Canadian Standard (i.e. two plus Canadian raising - ride, write, cloud, clout) and "mourning" isn't one of them. And while my consonants do tend to devoice themselves when they're not supposed to, my only frame of reference for vowels is Canadian Standard.
So I have no idea why I'm doing this. It's like a fake enunciation, an overcorrection. I also do it with "boy" and "buoy". And I don't mean that I pronounce "buoy" as "booo-eeee", I just mean that I insert a sort of fake dipthong and then Canadian-raise it even though no such thing exists in reality (and there isn't even a devoiced consonant afterwards) - just to acknowledge the spelling difference or somsething.
No wonder phonetics was my worst thing in linguistics.
(Aside: I wonder if Phonetics has anything to do with Phonecians?)
2 comments:
Aside: I wonder if Phonetics has anything to do with Phonecians?
I was curious about this, since they invented the first alphabet - but also because word origins can be so deceptive. So I looked it up.
From the Online Etymological Dictionary:
"representing vocal sounds," 1826, from Mod.L. phoneticus (1797), from Gk. phonetikos "vocal," from phonetos "to be spoken, utterable," verbal adj. of phonein "to speak clearly, utter," from phone "sound, voice" (see fame). Phonetics "scientific study of speech" formed in Eng. 1841.
I guess that means no.
Oooh, thanks for that etymology site! I didn't know about that at all, so for all this time I've been waiting until I can go to work and look up word origins in the OED, then typing everything out and emailing it back home.
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