I have [əɪ] there, too.

That's weird, I had never heard about such split!

On topic: I'm sorry for being rude =( , but I don't see a point in changing a language's orthography, worse for English, since there are already so many attempts trying to follow the phonemes, and the dialects aren't that consistent.

What I'd like to see would be an orthography consciously trying to give it another flavor, say, one making modern English look more like Old English (don't ask me how in the world that would work though ). One made for purely artistic purposes...

It's because there's a flap there, I think. So it's ['spəɪ.ɾɚ]. That flap is an allophone of both /t/ and /d/.
I did that once (based on the standardized orthography you see in printed editions of works like Beowulf, not the real spelling. It worked out better than most reforms, I think, because there's some history behind it to justify the spelling choices.

I have also tried writing like in Middle English, which gives you a lot of freedom because spelling varied so much then.

But rider has the same flap for speakers with [ɾ] in spider, yet they say ['ɹaɪ.ɾɚ] and not *['ɹəɪ.ɾɚ] (since Canadian raising normally only applies before unvoiced segments). No, the reason for the difference is the lack of a morpheme boundary in the word spider.

In addition, I can distinguish quite and quiet even when the latter is pronounced so rapidly that it collapses to a single syllable. Raising applies in the first case, but never in the second regardless of syllabification.

Well, ['ɹəɪ.ɾɚ] would be writer, so it's arguably a minimal pair.
You can do that? It's always /'kwaɪ.ət/ with two syllables for me. What kind of English do you speak natively?

For me, too--in normal speech. But haven't you even been at an event where someone is talking when it isn't appropriate and you hiss "Quiet!" at them under your breath? IME, people (including me) often do this so quickly that they compress the word into a single syllable. You can hear an example of this at the beginning of the following song: http://fredoviola.com/media/opus/the_turn.


I was born in Baltimore and grew up in St Louis, so my native variety is basically Northern Midland with a handful of South Midland (e.g. pin-pen merging, y'all) and rural/Mid-Atlantic features (e.g. intrusive /r/ in water, initial stress in umbrella). My raising isn't true Canadian raising since the raised nuclei aren't truly central as they are in Canada--perhaps [ɐ] rather than [ə].

My idiolect is non-rhotic, so I say something more like ['ɻʷəɪ.ɾə] or ['ɻʷəɪ.ɾɐ]

وهل سوف تعلقه؟

I actually use a retroflex /r/ too.
Perhaps.

Do you labialize yours at the beginning of a word? I seem to do that a lot.