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Re: Questions about Schwa and Stress

From:Roger Mills <romilly@...>
Date:Sunday, October 14, 2001, 6:17
David Peterson wrote:
As for me, most of my diphthongs have been done
>away with, since they were mostly in back, and those got lost when all my >back vowels de-rounded. But I still say things like "sky" as [skAj], and I >can prove it by recording it on Praat, reversing it and playing it
backwards
>to show that the vowel is not the same backwards as it is forwards, which >proves it's a diphthong--provided that we all agree that the definition of
a
>diphthong is a single vowel segment which ends in a different place where
it
>began?
What is Praat? I love things played backwards. A long time ago, messing around with a friend's unfamiliar tape-recorder, I put in the demo tape, and heard strange music and a Most Curious Language. Sounded like fake Swedish (a little sing-songy) spoken by a Russian (lots of palatalization). The most frequent word seemed to be [ojIr'its]. Eventually I figured out, or was told, that the tape had somehow got rewound backwards. It was English.