Re: question on sampa representation

Sally Caves scripsit:

> I have always had difficulty understanding why the schwa
> [upside down "e" and what I thought was illustrated by the @ sign] was also
> used to represent a very different sound, the relaxed, often emphasized
> middle vowel in our American English words of, above, cut, love, under, but,
> someone, undo, money, and so forth.  I thought a schwa represented a vowel
> so unstressed that it had virtually no pronunciation whatsoever, as the "e"
> in "father."  If this question has been answered, please forgive me.  But
> how the heck do I indicate the stressed and unstressed middle vowel and the
> schwa in SAMPA?
In IPA proper, the vowel you mention is represented by an upside-down V;
in X-SAMPA it's a V.  In American English, [V] and [@] represent stressed
and unstressed forms of the same phoneme, conventionally written /@/,
which is probably the source of your confusion.  In other Englishes,
they are distinct phonemes.

The X-SAMPA-annotated IPA chart at
http://www.i-foo.com/~kturtle/misc/xsamchart.gif is excellent for
matching printed IPA symbols with on-line X-SAMPA ones.  I have
just exercised my substantial chutzpah [xUtsp@] and sent a note
to J.C. Wells about it, along with the SAMPA to IPA translator at
http://odur.let.rug.nl/~kleiweg/sampa/translate.html .

--
John Cowan           http://www.ccil.org/~cowan              cowan@ccil.org
To say that Bilbo's breath was taken away is no description at all.  There
are no words left to express his staggerment, since Men changed the language
that they learned of elves in the days when all the world was wonderful.
        --_The Hobbit_

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