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In English, many vowel shifts only affect vowels followed by in rhotic dialects, or vowels that were historically followed by an that has since been elided in non-rhotic dialects. Most of them involve merging of vowel distinctions, so that fewer vowel phonemes occur before than in other positions in a word. ==Overview== In rhotic dialects, is pronounced in most cases. In General American (GA), is pronounced as an approximant or in most positions, but after some vowels is pronounced as ''r''-coloring. In Scottish English, is traditionally pronounced as a flap or trill , and there are no ''r''-colored vowels. In non-rhotic dialects like Received Pronunciation (RP), historic is elided at the end of a syllable, and if the preceding vowel is stressed, it undergoes compensatory lengthening or breaking (diphthongization). Thus, words that historically had often have long vowels or centering diphthongs ending in a schwa , or a diphthong followed by a schwa. * ''earth'': GA , RP * ''here'': GA , RP * ''fire'': GA , RP In most English dialects, there are vowel shifts only affecting vowels before , or vowels that were historically followed by . Vowel shifts before historical fall into two categories: mergers and splits. Mergers are more common, and therefore most English dialects have fewer vowel distinctions before historical than in other positions in a word. In many North American dialects, there are ten or eleven stressed monophthongs; only five or six vowel contrasts are possible before a following in the same syllable (''peer, pear, purr, par, pore, poor''). Often, more contrasts exist when the is not in the same syllable; in some American dialects and in most native English dialects outside North America, for example, ''mirror'' and ''nearer'' do not rhyme, and some or all of ''marry'', ''merry'' and ''Mary'' are pronounced distinctly. (In North America, these distinctions are most likely to occur in New York City, Philadelphia, some of Eastern New England (some, including Boston ), and in conservative Southern accents.) In many dialects, however, the number of contrasts in this position tends to be reduced, and the tendency seems to be towards further reduction. The difference in how these reductions have been manifested represents one of the greatest sources of cross-dialect variation. Non-rhotic accents in many cases show mergers in the same positions as rhotic accents do, even though there is often no phoneme present. This results partly from mergers that occurred before the was lost, and partly from later mergers of the centering diphthongs and long vowels that resulted from the loss of . The phenomenon that occurs in many dialects of the United States is one of tense–lax neutralization, where the normal English distinction between tense and lax vowels is eliminated. In some cases, the quality of a vowel before is different from the quality of the vowel elsewhere. For example, in some dialects of American English the quality of the vowel in ''more'' typically does not occur except before , and is somewhere in between the vowels of ''maw'' and ''mow''. (It is similar to the vowel of the latter word, but without the glide.) It is important to note however that different mergers occur in different dialects. Among United States accents, the Boston, Eastern New England and New York accents have the lowest degree of pre-rhotic merging. Some have observed that rhotic North American accents are more likely to have such merging than non-rhotic accents, but this cannot be said of rhotic British accents like Scottish English, which is firmly rhotic and yet many varieties have all the same vowel contrasts before as before any other consonant. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「English-language vowel changes before historic /r/」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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