Re: Tirehlat romanization

David Peterson wrote:

>In a message dated 9/25/01 9:42:50 PM, valoczy@VCN.BC.CA writes:
><< > I don't want to believe the pronunciation in my TY book...
>
>What does it say? >>
>
>    For /a/ it says, just like you said, the "a" in "father" (they give the
>"o" in "hot").  For /a/ with the accent it says (and this I can't wrap my
>brain around) "like the 'u' in 'hut', only longer".  That seemed very
>far-fetched to me.  And it says the o's are the "aw" in "paw" (obviously
>open-mid back rounded), one short one long.  You say close mid, though,
which
>I was more inclined to believe...  Anyway, maybe it's dialectical.

IIRC the TY books were published in the UK, written by and aimed at speakers
of Brit. English (and probably based on RP)-- and the pronunciation guides
will be off for most of us in the US.
So the vowel of UK "hot" is indeed pretty close to what Frank V. described;
the vowel of UK "cup, hut" etc. is indeed closer to IPA [a] than to US [V].

At the tender age of 15, I had the TY Portuguese book-- they transcribed
final /a/ as "er", as close to schwa as I guess they could get without going
all technical; and the nasal vowels were written with a following "ng" (that
much at least I could figure out).  So Lesson 1, "boms dias" was a rather
puzzling _bongsh diersh_, and it went downhill from there.

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