Re: New Try from a New Guy

----- Original Message -----
From: "H. S. Teoh" <hsteoh@...>
To: <CONLANG@...>
Sent: Saturday, December 14, 2002 2:38 PM
Subject: Re: New Try from a New Guy


> > Is the first vowel sound in American English "father" [a]?  The way that
> > sounds normal to me doesn't seem to have any diphthongization at all.
>
> Well, first of all, "American English" isn't a very precise designation.
> The vowels in Texan are quite different from vowels in Boston, for
> example. In Texas, the /a/ in "father" is probably closer to [&] whereas
> in Boston it might be better described by [a]. In British English, it
> sounds like [A], although that's just my (not-so-accurate) perception.
No, I think that clears it up.  Thanks.

> And don't worry about misunderstanding SAMPA (or any IPA vowel, for that
> matter). Even up to now, I'm still not 100% clear on the "correct" values
> of IPA vowels. :-) And one could argue that there isn't any "correct"
> value anyway, since as I've pointed out earlier the non-peak IPA vowels
> probably covers a small range of different sounds.
I know what you mean here, but [aI] and [a] are clearly different, in that
one is a diphthong and the other is not.  Which is what I was looking at.