/@/ & /V/ (was: Blandness (was: Uusisuom's influences))

At 3:16 am -0400 8/4/01, Nik Taylor wrote:
>David Peterson wrote:
>> Actually, what's the deal with schwa and carrot?
'caret', surely?

>>I asked two of my
>> linguistics teachers, and all they can say is that carrot appears in
>> stressed syllables; schwa does not.
>
>I'm really not sure if there is a difference.  In my dialect, the vowels
>in "a cut" are both the same, except that the "a" is much shorter, but
>there's no difference in position of the tongue or anything.  Normally,
>it would be transcribed as /@ 'kVt/, but I'd say that, at least for my
>dialect, /@ 'k@t/ would be more accurate.
This discussion seems to crop up with tedious regularity.  Over the years,
I've got(ten) the distinct impression that /@/ and /V/ have, indeed, fallen
together in much (all??) American pronunciation.  The two sounds have also
fallen together in Welsh English.

But in the south east of England, at least, the two sounds are distinct.
As it has been pointed out several times of this list, we southerns have
_furry_ /'f@ri/ <-- _fur_ /f@:/, but _curry_ /'kVri/, i.e. _furry_ &
_curry_ don't rhyme for us.

Ray.

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A mind which thinks at its own expense
will always interfere with language.
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