Re: vowel descriptions

Tom Wier wrote:
> My point was just that I don't think there's any _phonemic_ distinction
> being made here, or at least in my dialect, at any rate.  In fact, if the
> phone [V] only exists in a complementary distribution as you have made
> above, where [V] only exists in stressed positions and [@] in unstressed,
> then that is in fact the definition of allophonic variation. At least, that's
> the situation in my dialect.
Right, that's what I was saying.  The point remains, however, that [@]
and [V] sound different to me, they are easily distinguishable, which is
peculiar, as you'd expect allophones to be not easily distinguishable to
a native speaker.

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