Re: Lax counterpart of [&]?

At 02:27 PM 9/14/03 -0400, you wrote:
>On Sat, Sep 13, 2003 at 10:13:00AM -0400, Isidora Zamora wrote:
> > Now I'm really confused!  From looking at the charts, I was under the
> > impression that [&] was a low front (tense) *rounded* vowel.  But I'm
> > pretty certain that I don't pronounce "path" and "pat" with a rounded
> > vowel, but with an unrounded one.  I've always thought that it was [{] that
> > I used for those.
>
>Oh!   Were you originally asking about X-SAMPA [&]??  I, and I believe
>the other respondents, assumed you meant IPA ash, X-SAMPA [{], which we
>usually use [&] for on here (and on sci.lang, too, I've noticed).
>
>-Mark
I (Isidora) was not the original enquirer.  I expect that the original
enquirer was asking about ash.  I simply looked up the & symbol on an
online X-SAMPA chart and autimatically assumed that the valuse shown there
was the value being discussed.  I a pretty new to the list and had no idea
that most people ussed & to represent ash.  Now I know.

Somewhere in this thread someone (but I'll never find it in my mailbox now)
asserted that there was no lax version of [&] (presumably he was talkning
about ash.)  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.

Isidora

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