Re: vowel descriptions

At 12:13 pm -0600 15/12/98, Nik Taylor wrote:
>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,
And also to me - I have not the slightest difficulty in pronouncing the
sounds differently.  Infact, as was pointed out on the list a few months
back, many English speakers do regularly make a distinction between the
sound in 'furry'/'f@ri/ and 'curry' /'kVri/.  The two vowels are _not_ in
complementary distribution in many varieties of English.

>as you'd expect allophones to be not easily distinguishable to
>a native speaker.
Quite so - because to many of us they are not simple allophones.

The so-called (and IMO wrongly called) "short" vowels /&/ /O/ /V/ do not
normally occur in unstressed positions and give way to shwa.  It's my
understanding that the phonemic status of [@] in English is somewhat
controversial, and is one of those awkwark customers that delight those who
do not subscribe whole-heartily to the phonemic theory.

Ray.