More about the penis/peonies contrast
After my recent blog posting about penis vs. peonies, I found this in John Wells’s Accents of English: The British Isles:
Some speakers also have instances of apparently autonomous length contrasts in other environments, e.g. leek [lik] vs. leak [li?k], vane [ven] vs. vain [ve?n], creek [krik] vs. creak [kri?k], choke vs. joke, made vs. maid, badge vs. cadge.
However, when I asked Phyllis to read aloud these words, she didn’t have any length contrasts in them, so she doesn’t seem to be in the group of speakers mentioned by Wells.
Curiouser and curiouser.