When I was little I used to mentally transliterate everything that I heard so that I would ’see’ a written representation of speech in my head. I’m not so aware of this any more but I have a feeling that many people do this on a subconscious level.

I still do that — not for everything maybe, but for much. And for Chinese, I do it in Pinyin.

I know of a native English speaker who does it too.

But the underlying long vowels are a little different acoustically from the ones that map to Vr. Not all of them, and not for all speakers, but enough of them for enough speakers.

In my native non-rhotic German, postvocalic /ʀ/ manifests as the second half of a clear diphthong, [ɐ̯]. This also often happens in non-rhotic English, though apparently not for all speakers, for [ɜ] less commonly than for the others, and if it still happens, the [ɐ] (or [ə] or whatever) is considerably shorter than the first part of the diphthong, which is outright long (if stressed), while in… at least southeastern German both parts have the same length unless the first part is phonemically long.

Incidentally, weːz isn’t a diphthong for Boston English speakers – it’s wiəz.

Yeah, that’s what I think is going on, but it’s interesting that long vowels in ɹ-less dialects are perceived phonemically by speakers of ɹ-full dialects as being a normal length vowel followed by an /ɹ/, right?

As if the ɹ-dropping rule was: Whenever you get the sequence /Vɹ/, assimilate the /ɹ/ to the vowel, thereby lengthening it.

So, to reverse this, which is what ɹ-full speakers will have to do to accurately understand people: Whenever you get a long vowel, consider (at least) the possibility that it was underlyingly a /Vɹ/ sequence.

I guess the question then becomes ‘does this get overgeneralised’? I think it probably does. as I said in a conversation with Michael Walsh the other day, the Bostonian English question [wɛ:z ma:li] has three possible interpretations, and therefore three answers: “I don’t know where she is”, “He’s probably buried in Jamaica” and “Next to Mauritania”.

~

¹Sorry Piers, I couldn’t resist.