The aim of this paper is to show how the investigation of a borderline and apparently minor area of phonetics may help to shed light on certain indistinct areas in phonological theory.

From the time of the invention of alphabetic writing until the end of the nineteenth century, students of language unquestioningly accepted, the view that speech consisted of sequences of discrete sounds, strung together like the beads of a rosary. Speech has been traditionally looked at ‘as consisting of segments, each one of which represents a phoneme, which are put together to build up speech.… Each segment is envisaged as a posture of the vocal organs, and these postures are joined together by means of glides, which take us from one to the next’ (Abercrombie, 1965: 121).

1. In Lodge (1966), the data presented for the dialect of Stockport, Cheshire, did not show up the possible contrastive opposition in the vowels mentioned by Wells (1970: 238; in Wells' transcription, /e/: /ε̌/). It concerns the reflexes of ME ā, as in name, and ME e + gh (= voiceless palatal or velar fricative), as in eight, which have fallen together in RP. In the North of England, however, including part of the N.W. Midlands, the retension of [ç] and [x] longer than elsewhere in the country has caused differences in phoneme allocation and distribution. In the light of further evidence from Stockport and further experience of dialectal reflexes of Middle English, it seemed worthwhile re-assessing the phonemic interpretation of the Stockport data and comparing a few features of the phonology with older forms of speech from around the same area. We shall restrict our attention mainly to the vowel systems, with particular reference to the distinction mentioned above.

In the specimens of non-tone languages given in the current reprint (1967) of The Principles of the International Phonetic Association, prosodic features are rather inadequately dealt with; stress is usually mentioned, but intonation never. The North Indian languages presented there suffer in this way: stress in Bengali is discussed briefly, and some reading conventions are given, but for Hindustani (Urdu) and Oriya stress is simply described as ‘weak and variable’ and is not marked in the texts. Intonation is not discussed at all. This means, in effect, that a learner without direct assistance from a native speaker will be likely, if he attempts to read these specimens aloud, to use the intonation patterns of his mother tongue—to read with English intonation, or French intonation, and so on. We shall not be the first to observe that any attempt to pronounce a foreign language with unacceptable intonation patterns will not succeed, no matter how well articulated the consonant and vowel segments may be.