Re: Schwa and [V]: Learning the IPA

On 6/15/06, R A Brown <ray@...> wrote:
> I do not recall anyone questioning the existence of [U] in any American
> dialect. The only reason [U] has occurred in this current version of the
> [V] ~ [@] thread is that in England [sic]
"England [sic]?"  Are you emphasising the fact that you mean England
proper, rather than all of Great Britain or the UK as a whole?

> This is generally the case in most places. As far as I know, no one has
> ever questioned this; but the pronunciation of the phoneme /u/ does very
> in the anglophone world between AFAIK [u\] ~ [u] ~ [M]
[M]?  Huh.  Who doesn't round their /u/'s?  And when are the rest of
the Wells volumes coming out in paperback?! :)

>  What I understood from these threads over the years is that generally Merkans:
> (a) have the same sound for the 'a' of 'about' and the 'u' of 'but'.
Yup.


> (b) the sound is some sort of central, unrounded vowel.
Yup again.  Although in my case it's open enough that the audible
difference caused by rounding is very slight.

I wrote:
>  > My realization that my /V/ is not IPA [@], either, is what started
>  > this thread. :)
And you replied:
> Ah. One of the problems IMO is that the IPA [@] is itself not clearly
> defined!
Well, that may be.  Based on its position in the IPA chart, however,
it's far too close to be the vowel I have for /@/=/V/.


> Traditionally, the 'a' an about and the 'e' in French 'le' have both
> been given the phoneme /@/. But the French sound is rounded, whereas the
> English sound is not.
Well, dagnabit, why didn't my French teacher mention that little
tidbit?  Very helpful.

> If one examines the 2005 version of the IPA vowel
> chart, the shwa symbol is given for:
> _both_ (a) the unrounded, close-mid central vowel (CXS [@\]);\
Huh.  Is the 2005 chart online?  That's an odd change - CXS [@\] used
to be IPA [ɘ] (reversed E), rather than the traditional schwa symbol
[ə] (turned E).

> Roger Mills wrote:
>  > But I wonder if RP uses [6] in "butt, putt, mutt, rut" etc.-- at
> least when I pronounce them with [6], they sound quite strange.
>
> Not, I think, most so-called RP speakers now. It seems strange &
> affected to me
>From this pair of observances I will assume that my /@/=/V/ vowel is
not, in fact, [6], as I earlier guessed.  I think it's time to do some
more investigatin'.

--
Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>

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