Re: Advanced English to become official!

Quoting Thomas Wier <trwier@...>:

> I assume Andreas intended this for a  general audience...
Indeed. I really should start always to check the headers of replies.

(Is it just me, or are we experiencing technological regression here?)

> ---- Original message ----
> >Date: Sun,  3 Apr 2005 02:20:26 +0200
> >From: Andreas Johansson <andjo@...>
> >Subject: Re: Advanced English to become official!
> >To: trwier@uchicago.edu
> >
> >Quoting Thomas Wier <trwier@...>:
> >
> >> > >-Curious: Why did you use "ae" for schwa, rather than "a",
> >> > > when you use "a" for carrot [V]?
> >> >
> >> > I chose this to distinct between normal a and schwa. The carrot
> >> > [V] is just a short a, so I wrote it as such.
> >>
> >> In most dialects of English, including the English spoken by most
> >> nonnative speakers whose use you value so highly, there is no
> >> phonemic distinction the carrot [V] and the schwa [@].
> >
> > Hm. I'm not sure that's true of the RPoid Englishes that are traditionally
> > taught in European language classes. Can't seem to think of any minimal
> > pairs, tho.
> >
> > A candidate could be the negating prefixes _an-_ [@n] and _un-_ [Vn].
> > I suppose it's arguable that they're phonemically /&n/ vs /@n/,
>
> I don't think you can say that _an-_ has an underlying representation
> with /@/.  The schwa allophones of /&/ are all predictable based
> on the usual nonstressed vowel reduction processes:  _anaphora_ [@'n&f@r@]
> vs. _anaphor_ ['&n@for] (_ana-_ works the same way as negating _an-_).
Fair enough. I suppose *all* unstressed [@]'s can be interpreted as reduced
forms of vowels other that /@/ (/@/, for the moment, denoting the vowel of
"cut"), altho some will be irrecoverable.

> I suspect the real difference between "cut" and "anaphora" has more to
> do with vowel-length than anything qualitative.
>
> > but
> > the contrast is still realized as [@] vs [V] whether or not we recognize
> > separate phonemes /@/ and /V/ or not.
>
> I wasn't arguing they're phonetically identical, only for
> the lack of a *phonemic* contrast (i.e., one at the underlying
> representation).  I should also say that one phonologist professor
> I knew told me as much that for many English speakers there is no
> contrast.
I'm quite happy to believe that.

> >Now, I won't pretend to know what proportion of non-native speakers have had
> >such phonologies inflicted on them.
>
> I should probably admit that my claim to that end was rather more
> impressionistic and anecdotal than empirical.  In my experience,
> nonnative speakers tend to have problems realizing stressed [I]
> and [U], but more rarely with [V].  Typically, if they have
> problems with [V], e.g. by realizing it as a short [a], then
> they tend to treat both [V] and [@] positions the same, which
> suggests a basic lack of contrast. (This of course is not
> rigorous proof of the fact, though.)
Here, people are liable to replace [V] with [a], and [@] with whatever vowel is
suggested by the spelling.

                                                            Andreas

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