Re: question on sampa representation

Tristan wrote:

>On Mon, 2003-03-24 at 16:00, John Cowan wrote:
>> 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.
>
>I'm just wondering... is the vowel in words like 'fur' (which I think is
>normally written as /f@r/) the same phoneme again in American English?
>That, I guess, would explain the way Americans pronounce 'hurry' and
>'furry' as rhymes, and why they tend to use 'ur' as the sound /"@r/,
>which I've always thought of as 'er'.
That's something else again. In a discussion some months ago, I asked about
this very sound. It sounds more like this "er" is [r\=], that is, the
syllabic version of "american r". The consonant [r\] is to [r\=] then as
[j] is to [i]. At least that's where that discussion went. There isn't
really any other sound before the [r\] ! "burn" would be [br\=n] ; it's the
same sound from start to finish.
And [Vr\] on the other hand, is the sound I hear Canadians use for "ar"
sometimes. Compare "carpet" [kVr\p@t] with "car" [kA:r\] (put k_h for k in
those cases, if you like).

M