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Re: YAEPT alert! [Re: Not phonetic but ___???]

From:Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>
Date:Sunday, April 18, 2004, 16:21
On Sun, Apr 18, 2004 at 05:49:01AM -0700, Philippe Caquant wrote:
> I used to pronounce "blood" like > it was "bleude" in French (like in "oeuf")
Which sounds reasonable to me.
> (while "floor" I pronounce rather like French "Nord"),
Yup.
> Aaargh ! I have not the faintest idea what "kjr\=" could mean.
You really should consult one of the websites that let you hear the sounds represented by the IPA symbols (which of course map directly to X-SAMPA/CXS). The symbol [r\] represents the usual American English "r" sound, which is an approximant (have you ever heard G. W. Bush say "Iraq"?). Like any approximant, it has a corresponding vowel that is effectively a drawn-out version of the same sound, but since it has no place on the official IPA vowel chart, we call it a "vocalic" or "vowel-like" sound instead. The vowel that goes with [j] is [i]; the vowel that goes with [w] is [u]; but since the vocalic that goes with [r\] doesn't have a separate symbol, we write it [r\=], where the = is the "syllabic" diacritic. The combination /@r\/ is realized as [r\=] in many dialects, and in many of those dialects the distinction between /@r\/ and /Ur\/ has been neutralized, so that /Ur\/ is also [r\=]. Both of those conditions hold for my dialect, so that for me, all of these words/syllables rhyme: "brr" = "burr", "cure", "deter", "exposure", "fur", "grrr", "her", "jure" = "Ger-" in "German", "kosher", "labor", "mer-" in "mermaid", "nur-" in "nurse", "per" = "purr", "quiver", "recur", "sir", "ter-" in "terminal", "utter", "valor", "were", "youngster", and "zither". -Mark

Replies

Henrik Theiling <theiling@...>
Philippe Caquant <herodote92@...>