Re: New Try from a New Guy

I see the original msg. went directly to Mr. Martin......

This is an afterthought:
You mentioned it would be nice to sit down with a linguist and discuss
phonetics....There used to be a UCLA grad student on the list, but I think
Real Life and Dissertation have forced him off.  (Marcus Smith? if he's
lurking, perhaps he or a friend could help.)  I assume you get from Catalina
to the mainland now and again, so if you have the time, it wouldn't be out
of order to visit one of the universities/colleges, hunt up a phonetics
teacher or bright grad student, and see what could be done.
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The original msg.:

Answering several msgs....
Michael David Martin wrote:

>So for that line in the chart I could have:
>
>Letter        SAMPA
>uh              /3/ = [@], [3], [6], [V]
>
Well it depends.... If in your language, the Phoneme /3/ indeed has all
those various allophones (i.e. phonetic realizations--usually in
environments that can be defined), then yes. For ex., the Amer.English
"central
vowel phoneme" can be labelled either /@/ or /V/, but with fairly
well-defined occurrences:
--- realized as [@] when unstressed (e.g. sofa, or the 1st e and last a in
telégraphy, and in the ending -er);
--- as [V] when stressed (e.g. but, butt, rug)
--- as [3] when stressed before /r/ (e.g. bird, return)
--- as [1] (IPA barred-i) in the ending -es (e.g. kisses, matches; this is
not universal I think).
Four very distinct sounds phonetically, but all "the same" in terms of how
they contrast with the other vowels of the Engl.
sound system. However, if you subsitute one variant for another, you will
sound a little strange, though it won't impede communication..

   Or if, as could be likely, it's just a question of how individual
speakers, or dialect groups,  pronounce it, then yes again.  For ex. the /@/
phoneme-- always unstressed-- in Indonesian can vary freely between [@] and
[1].  To some extent it depends on surrounding consonants, but using one or
the other will not sound strange or "wrong".  OTOH a lot of Indonesians, and
many learners, pronounce it [E]-- perhaps because it's written |e|, but also
from dialect/other language influence.  It's technically "wrong", but hardly
matters-- [E] /E/ does occur, but only in a few loan words, so the chance of
misinterpretation is almost nil.

and MDM later wrote:
>Others have also suggested I use /@/. I suppose I could do that, I'm
just wondering, if I'm considering them allophones, why it would matter
which one I used to represent the phoneme?

Right. It wouldn't matter.
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And Joe Fatula wrote:
>.  I don't know what dialect
exactly it represents, but here they are:

/a/ as in father
/A/ as in cot
/O/ as in caught
/@/ as in cut>

That's pretty standard US, and coincides with what I've always used.  A lot
of
people seem to have the same vowel in father and cot [A], and
_supposedly_ the/a Calif. dialect also has [A] in caught.
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And Arthaey Argosii wrote:
>Arrrg!  I hate vowels.  They're impossible to compare by using "standard"
English words.  As far as I can tell from listening to my own
pronunciations, "father," "cot," and "caught" all rhyme perfectly.  Only
"cut" sounds different.>

Are you a Californian? (see preceding comment)

>I hate it when foreign-language books use English words to show how vowels
should sound...>

True, but it's often as close as one can get without a lot of technical
phonetic explanation that would probably be lost on many students. (There
was a thread last summer (?) about the desirability of including IPA symbols
in textbooks-- consensus was that it would be a Good Thing, but consider the
problems:  several weeks at least of class time devoted just to IPA
(assuming the teacher knows it well enough), when the students would much
prefer to be learning how to say "Hello, do you want to go to bed with me?",
"Where is the toilet", or "I need a doctor"....

Obviously, the best thing is a well-trained native speaker as teacher--
someone who can actually explain exactly why Spanish /e/ is NOT the same
sound as in Engl. "day", etc. rather than just rant "No no no no, it's not
the same. Listen to me carefully...".

Equally good is the system used at college/university level for teaching
"exotic"
languages-- the teacher is American, but they hire a native speaker to serve
as model and explainer of fine points (e.g., my class had the wife of an
Indonesian grad student); but that's a little expensive.  Failing that, a
good set of tapes, which is what I resorted to when I taught.  There were
Indonesians available, but the dept. wouldn't/couldn't cough up the money to
hire an informant..

Even the hoity-toity prep school I attended 50 yrs. ago didn't have a native
Spanish teacher (they do now, along with a Japanese, and they did and do
have a Frenchman and a German)-- a much-loved gentleman who knew the grammar
and literature, but I don't recall him ever getting into finer points of
pronunciation (like Span [e] vs. Engl. [eI]!)
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And David Barrow wrote:
>I used to wonder what the heck they were on about when language and
grammar books said that Spanish "sé" was pronounced like English "say". I
couldn´t imagine were the authors  had learnt their Spanish. Until I finally
understood; every single one of those books was written by someone who,
unlike
me, doesn't diphthonise the vowel in words like say, late, etc.>

Probably more just a case of "close enough". <snobbish comment> Those Engl.
speakers who don't diphthongize are by and large, I suspect, not likely to
be authoring foreign language textbooks......</snobbish comment>

I've never quite gotten over my encounter at age 15 with the Hugo Teach
Yourself
Portuguese book, publ. in the UK.  It transcribed things like "boms dias" as
"bongsh diersh" and, as a 100% American and at the time linguistically
unaware, that's how I pronounced it.
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