52 ENGLISH PHONETICS: THEORY AND PRACTICE wontitatrv, since that was not exactly the word the had specified as part of the topic. Are the ‘words on the card’ thos, chairman utters, or those that are written? : Americans and some others prefer ‘ewontotetv, a variant which T imag would be resistant to haplology. . Chairman © that the 2.16. the happY vowel: = ee 1 stil receive a number of queries from students puzzled by ‘the happy vowel’ (shown in many dictionaries and textbooks as i, as opposed to i or The point is that the last vowel in happy and all other similar words can sound like the it of fleece or like the 1 of kit or something intermediate between them. The distinction between iz and 1 is ‘neutralized’ in certain phonetic environments. There are many thousands of other examples besides happy — very, coffee, valley, spaghetti, sanity, suddenly; also the second vowel in various, radiation. Current pronunciation dictionaries and other works use the notation i to show these cases in which the distinction between FLEECE (i:) and KIT (i) does not apply. Where it does apply, they write iz (as in green, bead, feet, reach, seating) or t (as in grin, bid, fit, rich, sitting), as appropriate. There is a corresponding neutralized back vowel u, as in thank you, incongruous, situation, - - More technically, it seems to be right to recognize two distinct vowel systems in English. The strong system (in RP) covers re #0 A 0 iz e1 at a1 UZ 9U aU 1D€9 ‘ar 9: ua 3, while the weak system covers not only i ua but also 1¥, as in finishes, executive. Weak vowels occur only in unstressed syllables, although strong vowels may be either stressed or unstressed. The vowels 1 v therefore belong to both systems. As a weak vowel, how- ever, u is increasingly replaced by 9. Various other accents, e.g. Australian, lack the distinction between weak 1 and a, or at least give it a very low functional load. Thus English seems to be moving towards a weak system of three vowels only: i w a. Vowel weakening involves a switching between the strong system and the weak system. We see this: . in words with strong and weak forms, e.g. can kaen - kan; . and in alternations such as preside — president, variety ~ var’ anatomy — anatomical. One of the reasons our spelling system is less than transparent is that it generally writes the strong and weak alternants identically. - The happY vowel is good news for speakers of languages such as Spanish, for whom the distinction between i: and 1 is difficult. Where we write i, they needn't bother to make that distinction.