Re: Sorting out those phonetics

On 19 May 00, at 10:52, Adrian Morgan wrote:

> I'm not receiving messages now because it was eating
> up too much time, but I do sometimes still glance
> over the web version of the list, to see what's
> going on.
>
> Thus, I was interested to hear Nik Taylor say:
>
>  > But [V] and [@] are virtually identical, at least
>  > in my idiolect (the standard disclaimer, it
>  > seems).  Both are mid-central vowels, with [V]
>  > only being very very slightly higher than [@]
>  > (and even that, I suspect, may be an artifact of
>  > artificially producing them).
>
> .. because that's news to me, and helps me to
> clear up what all those phonetic symbols mean. I'd
> wondered what the difference was between [V] and
> [a], because all the examples that are meant to
> illustrate [V] are invariably examples where I use
> [a].
>
Shurely some mistake?

AFAIK (IME), /V/ is 'wedge', the sound in British English RP {cut}, a mid-
open back unrounded vowel.  'slightly higher than /@/' would surely be <i-
bar>, or possibly <u-bar>?

---
Pb