Re: Lax counterpart of [&]?

On Sun, Sep 14, 2003 at 05:15:59PM -0400, Isidora Zamora wrote:
> I (Isidora) was not the original enquirer.
Oh, whoops.  Sorry.

> I am pretty new to the list and had no idea
> that most people used & to represent ash.  Now I know.
See this chart, which someone (Tristan, I believe?) was nice enough to
create, showing the deviances from X-SAMPA that are common on
here:

http://cassowary.free.fr/Linguistics/cxschart.png

The system, which he dubbed CXS, is almost identical with X-SAMPA.
The main substitutions are [&] for [{] and [u\] for [}], to
avoid punctuation, and [i\] for [1], because the latter is
indistinguishable from [l] in many fonts (it's nearly so in the
one I'm using).

Also, we allow ) to tie the preceding two letters together,
since the underscore is also used for diacriticals in X-SAMPA,
and only knowledge of the semantics distinguishes these two uses.
For instance, we only know that [g_G] is an affricate while [t_G] is
a velarized [t] because we know that velarizing a velar doesn't
make any sense, and that the stop and fricative components of an
affricate must share the same place of articulation.

> It seems to me, though, that I could swear that I remember one
> professor actually demonstrating tense and lax versions of ash.  IIRC, one
> of them was a variation used in stressed syllables in certain dialects of
> American English.  I don't recall any notation for it (other than
> diacritics, perhaps.)  The difference was fairly slight, but perceptible.
Interesting.  There may be a slight difference in quality between
stressed and unstressed [&] in my 'lect, but not enough to warrant
calling the latter a different vowel.

-Mark

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