Re: USAGE: English vowel transcription [Re: Droppin' D's Revisited]

Adrian Morgan wrote:
>Oh, how I would benefit from a computer that had both Internet access and
>a sound card!>
        Amen to that (at least the sound card part-- for many of us!
Myself, I'm working from memory of intro phonetics almost 30 years ago, and
a few synapses may have snapped over the years).

>What I find most striking/memorable about Dutch speak is the use of /@/
>in place of /a/. To my ears, Irina's pronunciation of 'Dutch' sounds like
>/d@tS/.>
        The Dutch word _vaak_ (meaning 'hobby', inter alia) can sound very
naughty, to the careless American ear.

>Hang on ... maybe this is why I'm confused about [i] and [I]. Because if
>[I] is the vowel in 'bit', as you're all telling me it is, then:
> - I never encounter the diphthong [eI]; always [&i]
> - I never encounter the diphthong [aI]; always [ai]
        Now you're getting into Australian, and we Up Here can't argue with
that ;-)
The use of "I" when describing these diphthongs is probably a convention
based on US (and maybe British) speech.  In IPA as I learned it, the vowel
of Amer.Engl. "bite" would be transcribed:  a (print a) with superscript I
(small cap i) plus a diacritic to indicate some raising toward pure _i_;
your language may differ.  I think Spanish probably does have IPA _i_ for
the offglide in its -ái-, one of those subtle differences that often aren't
pointed out to learners.  So no matter how fluent you might become, if you
pronounce e.g. cantáis with the diphthong of "bite" you'll still sound just
slightly "off" to a native speaker

>Anyway ... so /that's/ what you mean by long/short vowels! It would never
>have occurred to me to suspect that the term 'long vowel' would refer to
>a diphthong, except in a casual non-technical discussion where anything
>could mean anything.>
        True; it makes linguists' toes curl to  hear that.  But 1st and  2nd
grade classrooms probably aren't the place for "technical" discussion.  But
somewhere along the way, students _ought_ to be set right, with at least a
mini-discussion of phonetics and how the spelling of English vowels is way
off the wall !

>Now, as I understand it, [o] is the pronunciation of 'Oh' that I use when
>I'm singing (it is common for a diphthong in speech to become a vowel in
>song). I think of it as the 'poetic' pronunciation of 'Oh'.
>   One of several vowels that I *don't* know the IPA for is the one that
>my regular pronunciation of 'Oh' begins with, before it glides to [U].
>Because, if my understanding of [o] is correct, then it certainly isn't
>that.
        Amer.Engl. would call that phonetically [oU];  when we imitate
British speech, we'd say something like [EU]; Australian maybe [&U], though
we don't hear a lot of real Australian here (most recently, there was a good
4-part series on Australia on our public TV, written and narrated by Robert
Hughes, an ex-pat Aussie-- I heard a wide variety of accents from his
interviewees).

The "pure" (undiphthongized) IPA o doesn't occur in most Engl. -- Romance
and elsewhere yes; but then, the IPA cardinal vowels are based mainly on
French pronunciation.

>Another vowel I don't know the IPA for begins the diphthong in 'vowel'.
        General Amer. [vaU(w)@l] (or syllabic _l_ instead of -@l); Austr.
maybe??? [v&U(w)@l]????   Some Americans pronounce the "-ow-" diphthong that
way too.