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

Christopher Wright <dhasenan@...> wrote:
> 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\/.
But "gist" ["dZIst] has word stress, while [dZi\st] never does (the stressed
version is [dzVst]).

> Generally, high vowels reduce to [i\] and non-high vowels to [@].
Maybe, but that's assuming that you can recognize what the unreduced vowel
is, which isn't always clear (English spelling does not generally lead me
to a naturalistic underlying sound... as I said, the spelling doesn't help.)

> Muke quoting Paul Bennett
>> 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.
Hmm.  Well, not sure if you meant it in the context of English alone or not,
but [@] is not _necessarily_ a reduced vowel--that is, reduced _from_ a
vowel--that's just what it is in English.  If I were to say "banana" with
stress on each syllable, it _would_ be [%b@: "n{:n %n@:] (second n ambisyllabic)
and those [@]'s would be different from [V]'s.

	*Muke!
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