Re: THEORY: Ray on ambisyllabicity

And Rosta wrote, quoting myself:

> > I have a hard time telling [Ou] from [Ow]
>
> One can safely treat them as equivalent, either because they are, or
> because the difference between them is empirically insignificant.
Now, hang on.

Near the bottom of your message, which I answered first, you tell me that
I've had [u]/[U] confused all this time and that my belief that _book_ is
[buk] and _boot_ is [bUt] is incorrect.

However, here you tell me that it's perfectly acceptable to confuse [u]
with [w].

Now [w] is very similar to the vowel in _book_ (except that the lips are
slightly tighter) and not even remotely similar to the vowel in _boot_.
If [w] is a close phonetic relation of anything, it would have to be the
vowel in _book_, which is indeed what I had down as [u].

In other words, I'm getting mixed messages here.

> > /oU/ as in _ode_, _mode_. The initial vowel could be phonetically
> > equivalent to a wide range of things - among them [a], [@], [o] - but
> > I've picked up that it's traditional to use /oU/ for diphthongs of
> > this type.
Make this, "Neutral vowel, perhaps in the vicinity of rounded-[V] but
phonemically best transcribed /a/ or /@/, followed by the {oo} in
_boot_".

> I've not seen "/oU/", and it's not very mnemonic for the Aus vowel. I
> really don't believe it ever begins with [o].
I know it doesn't! However it doesn't quite begin with [a] or [@],
either. The advantage of using /a/ or /@/ would be that these already
exist in the phoneme inventory.

Do we understand each other yet?

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