Re: YAEPT: OMFG I'm a mutant!!! (was Re: Advanced English to become official!)

Paul Bennett <paul-bennett@...> wrote:
> I seem to be at odds with the entire English-speaking world. Not only do I
> distinguish /i\/ from /@/ (which apparently is unheard of in both American
> and British dictionaries, but to my ear as clear as a bell in actual
> speech on both sides of the pond),
Lotta people do. I do, most of the time, though I can't think of a minimal pair.


Muke Tever wrote:
>Odd, I have the opposite problem: hard to find the distinction between the
>unstressed /i\/-like sound and /@/, and always have to go to my AHD to find
>out what the 'standard' is.  (It sometimes, but not always, seems to follow
>the orthography, which is to say the spelling doesnt help.)
>
>Er, unless you mean the /i\/ of words like "just".  I recognize that one.
>(And so apparently does the AHD, though like the above sound not
>distinguishing it from unstressed /I/.)
[dZi\st]? I'd think you were saying 'gist' /dZIst/. English has [i\] but not
/i\/. Generally, high vowels reduce to [i\] and non-high vowels to [@].

Muke quoting Paul Bennett
>> but I clearly have [V] for /V/, and never [@]. A stressed /@/ in my
lectis pronounced as whatever vowel it was reduced from, which is
almostuniversally reconstructable based on English's lovely
morphoetymologicalspelling, and a small measure of knowledge of etymology.
>
>I have no trouble distinguishing [V] and [@] either, though the stressed /@/
>is almost never enforced to its unreduced form, except in a few function words
>which are always normally unstressed (e.g. to, an, the).  Ordinary words spoken
>slowly with emphasis on each syllable would still have the schwatic sound,
>unless specifically trying to indicate the spelling as well (though admittedly
>this is probably the most common reason for stressing schwas at all).
People generally concede that English has phonemic /V/ that's realized as
[V] in stressed syllables, though it can be reduced like other vowels. At
any rate, convention says that a stressed schwa is [V] and an unstressed
form of [V] would always be [@]. Schwa is a reduced vowel; in spectrograms,
you always tell it because it's extremely short and usually neutral, sort of
like a tap except it's a vowel (and probably five times wider, but that's
1/3~1/2 the width of normal vowels). [V] has a medium F1 and a medium F2, so
if you have a full-length vowel you can't identify (in the spectrogram),
it's probably [V].

Are you using different definitions for [@] and [V]? I'm not certain that
English has a phonemic schwa, though you'd probably want it for some
syllabic consonants at least.

-CWright

Replies