It has struck me over the past couple of weeks that the way news readers pronounce the ‘new’ name of Burma says something about English vowel phonemes. Most of them are incapable of pronouncing Myanmar with an initial nasal+glide (as I believe it’s supposed to be pronounced: Wikipedia entry). Instead what we hear is generally something along the lines of

̀[ˈmiɑnˌmɑɚ]

Presumably, if the /ju/ sequence in English in words like ‘mute’ were biphonemic (as in, say, the Trager-Smith phonemicization), the /j/ would be freely combinable and /mja-/ would be easy. But it’s not. So we could guess that /ju/ is a unit phoneme (similar to /aɪ/, or even /u(w)/ and the palatal glide is an integral part of the phoneme and thus not separable to be combined with any random vowel that another language might need.
Anyway, just a random thought I wanted to post somewhere while the news was still current.

It’s near the start of the semester (actually beyond the start for some of us in the Midwest), so I thought those of you who haven’t seen this strip need to do so:

http://rhymeswithorange.com/

(if you see this after August 25, you need to call up the strip for August 11)
I’m sure some of us could improve on it, but still, it might be useful for something…

I think I have a possible answer to Eric’s question, also, although we’d have to do some research on the exact chronology. In Cole Porter’s Kiss Me Kate there’s the great song ‘Brush Up Your Shakespeare’, which has great rhymes. One of them, of course, is:

Just declaim a few lines from Othella
And they’ll think you’re a hell of a fella
If your blonde won’t respond when you flatter ‘er
Tell her what Tony told Cleopatterer

Here the motivation for the extra syllable is clear, but Kiss Me Kate premiered in 1948, so the silly pronunciation may have been floating around. But the film was dated 1946, so maybe not. According to imdb.com the soundtrack of Till the clouds roll by was the first ever released of a live (as opposed to animated) movie.
Anyway, tiny additional amount of data from a Broadway freak…

Geoff

This is my first official post, so apologies if I get things wrong, either etiquette-wise or technologically…

It would be interesting to see what assorted ‘illiterate’ subjects to with other allophones of /t/. David Stampe told me years ago of children who systematically replaced their parents’ glottal stops with slightly aspirated [t]’s in word such as ‘kitten’, ‘mitten’. This was particularly interesting since the adults never said [mIt@n].
Given his views, of course, what the children were doing was perceiving the intention and pronouncing that, since they didn’t yet control glottal stops. That doesn’t explain why children would systematically revert to the voiceless underlying target in non-alternating contexts however.
Geoff