Re: Schwa and [V]: Learning the IPA

Paul Roser wrote:


| Right - *official* IPA has [V] as the low-mid back unround vowel, the
| counterpart to [O] (reversed c), *however* Wells and just about every
other
| text I've ever seen on English phonetics and phonology uses this symbol
for
| the stressed vowel in /but, cut, above/ etc. So there's a definite
| disconnect between how the IPA interprets the symbol cross-linguistically
| and how English specialists interpret it. Which makes me wonder if Catford
| or Ladefoged ever used a different symbol in narrower transcriptions -
I'll
| have to check when I get home.

Right. I think this was exactly the idea behind the message that began this
very interesting thread I cannot contribute to, because I am not a native
speaker. If you ask me, I pronounce the vowel in |but|, |cut| etc. as [7],
and all Americans I ever talked to, seemed to understand me quite well,
mentioning that my pronunciation was close to RP.

-- Yitzik