Re: OT: Definitely Not YAEPT: English phoneme inventory?
| From: | Doug Dee <amateurlinguist@...> |
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| Date: | Saturday, July 19, 2003, 16:58 |
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In a message dated 7/16/2003 9:21:43 AM Eastern Daylight Time,
markjreed@MAIL.COM writes:
> Technically, yes, this concerns English pronunciation. But I'm not
> interested at this time in idiodialectic variation. I'm just looking
> for a good list of English phonemes, regardless of how they're actually
> realized in 'lect X.
>
> A dictionary pronunciation guide seemed like a good place to start,
> so I grabbed the one from m-w.com. But I'd be interested to hear
> comments from you fine folks.
>
> Here's the M-W guide:
>
> M-W X-SAMPA
> \&\ as a and u in abut /V/ or /@/
> \a\ as a in ash /{/
> \A\ as a in ace /e/
> \ä\ as o in mop /A/
> \au\ as ou in out /aU/
> \ch\ as ch in chin /t_S/
> \e\ as e in bet /E/
>
How does M-W reflect the 3-way merry/marry/Mary distinction?
(Around here, "merry" has the vowel of "pet" usually labeled /E/, "marry" has
the vowel of "pat", usually labeled /{/, while "Mary" is distinct from both.
Some people say it has the same vowel as "ace" (which you gave as /e/ but
which I'd rather call /ej/ or the like), but that doesn't work for me since I
think "yeah" has the Mary vowel & it doesn't sound like "yay".
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