Re: OT: Phonetics (IPA)

On Tue, 2003-07-15 at 05:04, Mark J. Reed wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 14, 2003 at 11:05:12AM -0700, Stone Gordonssen wrote:
> > >For what it's worth, I pronounce "claw" as [klA:].
> >
> > And for me, it's [kl7:].
>
> Well, in many, perhaps most non-American, native English dialects
> -aw is realized as [O] and distinguished from -ah ([a] or [A]).
> So it's not surprising that you have a higher vowel than I do in "claw".
> However, [7] seems pretty far away from [A].  I mean, it's two whole
> steps up, depending on how you count! :)
Well, I say [klo:]. And in a word like 'all', the vowel has not only
approached it but gone above and begins to approach a backer form of
[U].

> > To my ear, [A] and [7] seem to sound the same.
>
> Really?  Wow.  They sound nothing alike to me.  [7] is just a long
> [o] with unrounded lips; it doesn't occur in my speech naturally,
> but to me it sounds virtually indistinguishable from [U] (which is
> the vowel in my pronunciation of "book", "put", etc.).  [A], on the
> other hand, is the vowel in of "Bock" and "pot", not to mention
> the noise the dentist asks you to make to keep your tongue
> out of his or her way.  Well, I guess that would technically be
> [A:], with maybe a few more colons added in for good measure. :)
All back unrounded vowels unless they're really high sound close enough
to [A] to me. Really high ones (basically [M]) I can hear fine, though.

And I went to the dentist last Friday and she never said say 'ah'. She
says open your mouth wide or big.

--
Tristan.

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