Re: Schwa and [V]: Learning the IPA

On 6/13/06, taliesin the storyteller <taliesin-conlang@...> wrote:
> If you have time for a class at university/college, look for
> "Introduction to phonetics"-classes or "Introduction to articulatory
> phonetics"-classes, or classes for speech therapists.
A good thought.  I took an introductory linguistics class when I was
in college, but it was light on the articulatory phonetics.  Speech
therapists didn't occur to me at all... but they would seem less
interested in producing weird sounds than in recognizing them. :)

On 6/13/06, Tristan Alexander McLeay <conlang@...> wrote:
> Use Praat. Get it to make a recording of your vowels and create
> spectrograms of them. This should give you a rough idea of where
> you're pronouncing them, and in what direction you need to change to
> improve.
>From this recommendation, may I assume that Praat comes with - or
there is otherwise available - a set of spectograms indicating what
the IPA vowels should look like?

> (some take backness as being F2, others as F2-F1).
Ah yes, the mysterious (to me) "formants".  Seems like such a vague
term to use for something so specific. :)


> |especially since [O] doesn't exist in my 'lect at | all(*).
> > (*) Not even in words like "ball" [bAl] or "law" ([lQ:])
> How about words like "story" or "sorry" or, ehm, "or"?
The words "story" and "or" have the same vowel (Wells' NORTH or FORCE,
which are the same vowel for me); "sorry" on the other hand is an
exact homophone of "sari" and has the START vowel.

The vowel is in either case heavily rhoticized, which - along with my
newfound incompetence in such matters :) - complicates the
determination.  Nevertheless I have endeavored to identify the vowel,
and in the OR case it seems to be something like [o_o].  That is,
between [o] and [O], but closer to the former than the latter.

> What is the first element of the diphthong in "boy" for you?
The non-rhotic version of the same vowel.
--
Marcos

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