Talk:Phonological history of English close back vowels

Dew-duke merger
Did the "dew-duke" merger ever occur, or is it simply that the French sound was nativised as the diphthong ? This is certainly what I understand. One of the sources say there was not (albeit by ommission); the cited one isn't loading on my computer so I can't see what it was. —Felix the Cassowary 13:11, 6 January 2006 (UTC)
 * I don't know. The website you can't load does imply that vertu and nature had in Chaucer's English, but that doesn't mean they're right. I don't know what if anything has been published on the question, but I suspect the status of  in early Middle English loanwords from French was similar to the status of  in modern German loanwords from English. Some people use the foreign sound, other people substitute the closest native sound. --Angr ( tɔk ) 13:21, 6 January 2006 (UTC)

The vowels assigned to new and dew are inconsistent with Phonological history of English in the Up to Shakespeare's English section. That assigns /iu/ to dew (given as new here) and /ɛu/ to new (given as dew here). This means that the mergers on both pages disagree (so that using the transcriptions here, the dew-duke merger on the Phonological history of English page would be a new-duke merger, unless the dew-new merger occurs first so the /iu/ in the dew-duke merger is the result of the dew-new merger).  Rhdunn (talk) 12:37, 10 December 2013 (UTC)

Title of this page
Should this page be titled Phonological history of English high back vowels or Phonological history of the English high back vowels to clarify that it's specifically about the English high back vowels? Voortle 23:50, 15 June 2006 (UTC)
 * I guess, but I'm not finding a difference between your two suggested titles. Angr (talk) 05:20, 16 June 2006 (UTC)
 * I meant to put a "the" in one of the possible titles, which I've just done. This move would also apply to phonological history of the high front vowels and phonological history of the low back vowels. Voortle 12:48, 16 June 2006 (UTC)

Foot-goose merger
This is apparantly not a phonemic merger, but an appliance of the Scots vowel system to the English language in such dialects (Macafee 2004: 74). I've done some rewriting to cover that. Voortle 19:53, 17 June 2006 (UTC)
 * This is a phonemic merger (see e.g. Wells (1982)) because the -  contrast is unrecoverable due to the Scottish vowel length rule. — Peter238 (v̥ɪˑzɪʔ mɑˑɪ̯ tˢʰoˑk̚ pʰɛˑɪ̯d̥ʒ̊) 20:00, 16 February 2015 (UTC)

Proposed move
Phonological history of the high back vowels to Phonological history of English high back vowels. This article is specifically about the English high back vowels. This move also applies to the articles Phonological history of the high front vowels and Phonological history of the low back vowels. Voortle 23:21, 17 June 2006 (UTC)
 * Add *Support or *Oppose followed by an optional one sentence explanation and sign your vote with ~ 


 * Okay, this article has been moved, but Phonological history of the high front vowels and Phonological history of the low back vowels still need to be moved. Voortle 18:54, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

Lead section
This article really needs a lead section, if only to explain to the clueless what it's all about. I doubt the average reader knows what a "high back vowel" is apart from being some kind of vowel. Hairy Dude 18:06, 16 July 2006 (UTC)
 * Okay I've written a short lead and done some other cleanup, including switch to standard footnote style. I don't know what book "Macafee 2004" refers to though. If anyone else does, please add that info. User:Angr 19:31, 16 July 2006 (UTC)

Foot-Strut split
I'm not sure why the article says, "The absence of the foot-strut split is sometimes stigmatized, and speakers of non-splitting accents often try to introduce it into their speech, sometimes resulting in hypercorrections such as pronouncing pudding /pʌdɪŋ/." In accents with the split, pudding IS pronounced /pʌdɪŋ/, as is, in fact, indicated in the preceding paragraph. User:Aiwendil42 —Preceding undated comment added 22:36, 12 June 2007.
 * No, pudding is pronounced with the FOOT vowel in accents (like GenAm and RP) with the foot-strut split. See for example,  (click on "Show IPA"), and pudding. It's only pronounced  as a hypercorrection by people without the split - in other words, people who have been told they have to say  rather than  for butter if they want to sound "posh" believe they also have to say  for . The previous paragraph says "In non-splitting accents, cut and put rhyme, putt and put are homophonous as , and pudding and budding rhyme" (emphasis added) - namely because non-splitting accents pronounce budding . +Angr 06:42, 17 July 2010 (UTC)


 * Sorry, I'm an idiot. I had /ʌ/ and /ʊ/ backwards in my head.  Aiwendil42 (talk) 16:10, 29 July 2010 (UTC)


 * Stigmatized by whom? Citation needed perhaps. KO (Punches) (talk) 18:30, 7 August 2011 (UTC)

Incomplete reference
There's a reference work cited in this article Macafee 2004:74, but no title for the reference. Perhaps it is the reference in the _Scottish English_ wikipedia page: Macafee, C. (2004). "Scots and Scottish English." in Hikey R.(ed.),. Legacies of Colonial English: Studies in Transported Dialects. Cambridge: CUP but I would only be guessing it is so... Netrapt (talk) 02:29, 24 December 2011 (UTC)

Quality Adjustment
What is this process about? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Backinstadiums (talk • contribs) 09:23, 7 June 2014 (UTC)
 * Lowering and often also fronting of the STRUT vowel from to, and then, in many accents also from  to . — Peter238 (v̥ɪˑzɪʔ mɑˑɪ̯ tˢʰoˑk̚ pʰɛˑɪ̯d̥ʒ̊) 17:34, 16 February 2015 (UTC)

...American accents, in which threw /θrɪu/ is distinct from through /θruː/
The claim of American "accents" using [θrɪu] is in dire need of a solid reference or two. I've lived in various places in the U.S. -- east coast, west coast, and in between -- and have no memory of hearing anything like [θrɪu]. As a native speaker of Lower Midwestern, I find it quite an effort to produce it, and it sounds very alien. 47.32.20.133 (talk) 17:22, 14 August 2018 (UTC)
 * The threw–through contrast in the source (Wells 1982: 206) is specifically about Welsh, which was neglected in the section. According to ANAE, /ɪʊ̯/ still exists in the US South, mostly North Carolina, but I too doubt it is present after /r/. Nardog (talk) 09:47, 18 August 2018 (UTC)
 * Exactly. Welsh isn't American, and while a do-dew contrast isn't difficult to find in the U.S., threw-through is fishy, indeed -- precisely due (!) to the /r/, as you say. 47.32.20.133 (talk) 16:34, 18 August 2018 (UTC)

Foot-strut split: Times or locations
Can anyone inform us about some specifics of the various stages Wells identified in the FOOT-STRUT split? It's helpful to know the chronology with labels like "Early Shortening," "Quality Adjustment," "Later Shortening," etc., but those labels could be specified a lot better if their general time-frames and/or geographic locations could be identified too. Are there any sources out there that explicitly estimate any of this? (For instance, Early Shortening was transitioning/completed around [some century] in [London].) Wolfdog (talk) 19:15, 14 February 2021 (UTC)

STRUT–COMMA merger: "Because of the unstressed nature of /ǝ/..." — Huh?
For initial reference/consideration, see Dr Geoff Lindey's video countering the claim that /ǝ/ is never stressed (youtu[dot]be/wt66Je3o0Qg). To boot, "strut" itself has a single stressed syllable. — JivanP (talk) 14:43, 28 November 2022 (UTC)


 * In the unmerged dialects, /ǝ/ is always unstressed. NURSE is a stressed schwa in modern SSB, but that's not really relevant for this section. Maybe it would be best to say that /ǝ/ is always unstressed in unmerged accents, or just to specify that what we refer to as the COMMA vowel is always unstressed. The phrasing does need to be improved somehow. Erinius (talk) 03:56, 29 November 2022 (UTC)

Partial Foot-Goose Merger
We should probably mention somewhere that ‘foot’ and ‘goose’ merge for specific words in accents where they don’t normally merge, such as the way that ‘tooth’ is pronounced with the FOOT vowel rather than the GOOSE vowel by many people from Birmingham (such as myself) and in South East Wales. This deserves to be every bit as famous as the way that some people in South East England say ‘room’ with the FOOT vowel and the way that in East Anglia and parts of the US, ‘roof’ can be heard with a FOOT vowel.

I would also like to point out the curious pronunciation of ‘sooner’ with a FOOT vowel by Adge Cutler of the Wurzels in the song ‘Don’t Tell I tell ‘ee’ and the fact that I heard the Northern Irish actor David Caves (as Jack Hodgson in Silent Witness) say ‘tooth’ in a remarkably Brummie way - though I am aware that Wikipedia officially considers there to be, slightly inaccurately, a full merger of FOOT and GOOSE in both Scottish and Northern Irish speech in any case. Overlordnat1 (talk) 07:46, 30 April 2023 (UTC)

image of "sun"
where is the research from to get that image? By F. F. Fjodor - Own work, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=14864993 Stjohn1970 (talk) 01:35, 20 July 2023 (UTC)


 * The Wikimedia page says it's based on a map from the Atlas of English Dialects, whose data comes from the Survey of English Dialects in the 1950s. Erinius (talk) 15:10, 20 July 2023 (UTC)
 * thanks. so, if you think that the findings still reflect the times and is accurate, the image is relevant, I suppose. I leave that to your discretion. Stjohn1970 (talk) 18:01, 20 July 2023 (UTC)
 * I doubt the map reflects the current majority pronunciation in every area - rather, it shows the "most traditional" pronunciation in each zone - since the SED was done in the 50s and aimed to survey mainly older men. It's still an important source of information of course, above all for historical purposes, and the map should remain here. Erinius (talk) 10:08, 25 July 2023 (UTC)