Re: OT: YAEPT: English low vowels (was briefly: Re: Y/N variants (< OT: English a...

On Fri, 14 Dec 2007 14:22:52 -0500, ROGER MILLS <rfmilly@...> wrote:

>Tristan wrote:
>> >> ROGER MILLS wrote:
>> > In the past I've gone to, and wondered at, the various hear-it-now IPA
>> > sites; almost all have a frontish [a] that IS NOT what I learned in
>> > Phonetics 101. That sound doesn't exist in my lect, where /a/ is closer
>>to
>> > [6] or [A] depending on the site. On reflection, I guess that [a] is
>>what
>> > French has, but not what I use when trying to speak French-- which
>>(surely
>> > among many other things) is perhaps why French people look askance and
>>tend
>> > to answer back in English......)
>>
>>You might have learnt the American Phonetic Alphabet? It's a different
>>beast. But there's also a long answer.
>
>I know. My phonetics course was a long time ago, in Summer of 1964, taught
>by (I'm sure) a disciple of Ladefoged, who was also in residence that
>summer. In addition to her text (Xeroxed, due to be published, but it never
>happened, as she died shortly thereafter), we had the IPA handbook of that
>era. As you and others have told me, there have been changes to the
>"official" IPA through the years. In any case, the front vowel now written
>[a] had a special symbol in our text, and corresponded (to our ears) to
>"Boston a" which is indeed frontish and would now I guess be symbolized [a].
>There was also a special symbol for the "o" that preceded [r\], neither [o]
>nor [O]. That too has apparently been deprecated.
>
>(These special symols had a heavy dot on on the end of the upper curve of
>[a] and reversed-c.)
Those symbols sound like two of the additions included in Gordon Peterson & June Shoup's
proposed physiological- and auditory-based phonetics, published in the 1966 Journal of
Speech and Hearing. It's actually quite well thought out, though some of their ideas have
been superceded by recent phonetic research (such as the work of Esling, Edmondson &
Harris on states of the glottis, voice quality & pharyngeal-laryngeal articulation). Peterson
& Shoup's phonetic chart incorporated vowels and consonants into one chart, with
pharyngeals and glottals below vowels.

-Bfowol

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