Re: Schwa and [V]: Learning the IPA

Mark J. Reed wrote:
<<
For a long time, I thought that I pronounced the English phoneme /V/ -
that is, the vowel in Wells' STRUT lexical set - as, in fact, [V]
 >>

In my opinion, this is just another one of those IPA myths they've
cooked up (i.e., when stressed, the "schwa" vowel in English is [V];
when unstressed, it's [@]; this is because schwa can never be
stressed in English).  I believe it has no basis in reality whatsoever.
If you hear this sound (which occurs in Vietnamese), it becomes
obvious that it doesn't exist in most (if not any) dialects of English
I've ever encountered.  Further, I don't know what arguments
were ever put forth to suggest that schwa can't be stressed in
English.  To me, it sounds like no one wanted to bother to do
the actual study, or that, if it has been done, no one has read it,
or wants to cite it, and so the [@]/[V] myth persists.

-David
*******************************************************************
"A male love inevivi i'ala'i oku i ue pokulu'ume o heki a."
"No eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn."

-Jim Morrison

http://dedalvs.free.fr/

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