Josh Roth wrote, quoting Tristan:

> > unless you analyse [&l] as /el/, which doesn't explain why 'shall'
> > and 'shell' are homophones. Not that I know a lot about phonemes...
>
> Well I'm not too familiar with your speech variety at all (I've only
> heard Australian speech in some beer commercials I think!). Those two
> words are not homophones for me though, the first is /S&l/ and the
> second /SEl/.

Most Australians will agree with you. However, Tristan comes from
Victoria where people often have a noticeably lower /E/ in certain
positions, e.g. before /l/. For some Victorian speakers this /E/ can
be as low as /&/, or so close that I can't tell the difference. One
of my non-current lecturers is an example.

Note: I'll happily use either /E/ or /e/ to denote the same phoneme.

> > Much more likely to merge into /f/ and /v/. Over on this side of
> > Melbourne, you hear people talking of veir maffs... I guess these
> > people are aware of the difference...
>
> You may certainly be right. I however, never hear /f/ and /v/ for /T/ and
> /D/, except in references to the speech of some Black people or

I'm currently in an email discussion with a person from Israel, and we
have been discussing phonetics among many other topics. He mentioned
his inability to master the English "th". I mentioned the mantra that
I was taught as a young child: "Put your tongue between your teeth and
say /thhh/". His response was, "Put your tongue between your teeth and
say ouch is how I would put it". :-)

Adrian.