Re: Lax counterpart of [&]?

Staving Isidora Zamora:

>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.
I was the original enquirer, and I was referring to the use of [&] most
common on the list, as "ash" or "Northern English short a".

Pete