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

Roger Mills wrote:

> I too think Adrian must have slipped up, when he wrote /bit/ 'bit' vs.
> /bI:t/ 'beat' (even allowing for Australian English....;-) ), and no
> wonder Irina was perplexed about /bI:t/ = more or less ?bate-- as I
> understand it, Dutch "short (or lax?) i" is indeed lower than Engl.
> [I], tending a little toward [e].
Oh, how I would benefit from a computer that had both Internet access and
a sound card!

I do my best to pick up phonetic symbols by observing how people on the
list use them. Mistakes are inevitable - that's obvious.

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 famous disconnect between Engl. spelling and phonetics.  I was
> originally taught:  short a as in mat, long a as in mate; short i as it
> bit, long i as in bite, and so on.... short o as in hop, long o as in
> hope. "Long/short" is genrally correct in historical terms, but of
> course [], [I], [a] are now totally unrelated phonetically to [eI],
> [aI] and [oU] etc.
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]

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.

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.
   I do tend to write /oU/ for 'oh' on this list, however, because I
think it's silly to be too prescriptive about conlang vowels unless
you've either ruled out dialects or are talking about a specific dialect.

Another vowel I don't know the IPA for begins the diphthong in 'vowel'.

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