Delete comment from: John Wells’s phonetic blog
@Anonymous:
"I've heard Irish people like you who have a vowel in father distinct from both PALM and THOUGHT. In their case, it seems to simply be a lengthened version of LOT, namely [A:]. I couldn't quite make out from your description if this is the case in your accent too."
Yes, that's it. Hickey's SOFT lexical set is a split of the LOT vowel before fricatives. I have the same vowel in "father" as "soft", but I wouldn't say "father has the SOFT vowel" because my "bother" retains the shorter vowel of "lot", and "soft" with the shorter LOT vowel sounds acceptable to me but "father" doesn't.
"When you were referring to Hickey's approach being rather cavalier, what specifically were you referring to?"
Not his phonology but his sociolinguistics. His book "Dublin English" has lots of good data, but sometimes explanations seem to be presented as fact rather than as plausible hypotheses requiring further research.
Feb 2, 2010, 10:38:43 AM
Posted to lexical sets