Re: OT: Phonetics (IPA)

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! :)

> 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. :)


-Mark

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