Re: Galveston

On 22/03/2025 1:22 a.m., Ruud Harmsen wrote:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhKZLhxFFUY
Galveston (Remastered 2001), by Glen Campbell
 In American English, Galveston apparently rhymes with "gun" and
"twenty-one". This seems quite weird from my perspective, and I
suppose from a British English perspective.
 (Peter T Daniels would certainly post an angry reaction to this, if he
were still here, ha ha.)
 

Here's how the phonemic analysis of AmEng that I was taught many years ago treats this:
The vowel of the -ton syllable is [ə]; it occurs only unstressed.
It's in complementary distribution with the phonetically similar [ʌ] in "gun" and "one", which occurs only stressed.
So the two are allophones of one phoneme.
(In the current pronunciation regime of OED, all three of these vowels are written as <ə>.*)
In the peculiar situation of setting words to a tune, if the -ton ends up on an accented note, it should be sung with [ʌ], and will rhyme perfectly with "gun" and "one".
(Something like this came up a few years ago in connection with a song in praise of the state of Oregon, where the singer had to find an accented vowel for the final syllable, which is normally [ə].)
*"Galveston" is not in OED, but I took this from "Boston" (a card game and a dance).