Tristan McLeay wrote, quoting myself:
> > <fx: inserts [8] into memory bank>
>
> fx?
"Effects" -- often used in ASCII transcriptions (e.g. on Usenet) to
denote an action being performed by the poster. Derives from the usage
in scripts.
> I have no idea whether Australian English has [a] or [A], I think it's
> actually in between the two, the first vowel of the diphthong /ai/ is
> different from the sound of 'car'. This is irrelevant at the moment,
> though.
I can't hear a difference.
> I think that you say that [Q] is the rounded form of [A] and [O] the
> rounded form of [a]?---this is not the case in X-Sampa.
I also said I could easily be wrong...
> Yup, [h8u-li] sounds RP to me all right. Well, [h@u...] would sound RP,
> but [h8u-li] would sound like a mock-RP by an Aussie.
[Incidentally we see here an example of what happens when an expression
containing '@' appears in Yahoo Groups - it gets followed by "...".
I'm reading via Yahoo Groups and copying/pasting/replying via email.]
These differences between Australian dialects are interesting. I have
a half-baked idea to write a page of notes on them for my website.
I'm not surprised that your "holy" is different from mine since both
are common, but I am surprised that you seem unfamiliar with [h*u-li].
> > [oo in school]
> > For me it's "higher" in the terminology you used previously, i.e. the
> > jaws are a little more closed. If you transcribe "wool" as [wul] then
> > I might transcribe "school" as, I suppose, [skw=:l].
>
> I think you cannot get a vowel higher than [u]. If you can, the vowel is
> generally transcribed as [U]
Oops, did I get "higher" and "lower" mixed up? I don't find that
terminology very descriptive, I'm afraid. All I mean to say is that
the jaws are a little more closed for "fool" than they are for "foot".
[A] is very low while [u] is very high - Is this correct?
> With 'wool', there's the added complexity of a diphthong: there's a
> schwa inserted between the /w/ and the /u/ (or else the /u/ is
> pronounced as a (potentially rounded) [@]).
There isn't for me. Definitely [wul] with the same vowel as in "put".
> However, I would say that 'full' and 'fool' were, indeed, distinguished
> purely by length. I don't think I can get a higher vowel than the one
> in there, so that's probably [u].
[u] equals [w=] (syllabic [w]). This is one thing I'm very confident
on, as I've been told so directly. So "fool" for me is [fu:l].
The vowel in "foot" is slightly more open (lower, I think).
> The vowel in 'boot' is more fronted (and long), but I wouldn't say
> it was diphthongal.
Agreed. I don't know of any dialects where it's diphthogonal.
> The vowel in 'foot' is the same as the 'full' vowel.
Agreed again, using my "full" vowel.
Adrian.