Re: Hear Me! Hear Me!

On Mon, 2002-06-24 at 20:39, Adrian Morgan wrote:
> Tristan McLeay wrote, quoting myself:
>
> <fx: inserts [8] into memory bank>
fx?

> > > > > For me, there is a rule that the "o" in "spoke":
> > > > > - cannot precede an /l/ in the same syllable,
> > > > > - but *can* precede an /l/ that is the start of the *next* syllable.
> I'm talking phonetically.
Okay. In such a case, then yes, I only have the first rule.

> I understand that [Q] is to [O] as [A] is to [a], where both [Q] and
> [A] are vowels that don't exist in Australian English. I've never
> learned how to transcribe the vowel in 'court'. I could easily be
> wrong.
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.

[Q] is the rounded form of [A]. [O] is the rounded form of [V] (the
wedge and a vowel which I don't use; the difference between 'heart' and
'hut' is one of length). The rounded form of [a] is small-capital O-E
ligature; I don't know the X-Sampa for this character.

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. Some other form
of ASCII-IPA may use it, but I'm not familiar with this.

> Hmm, until such time as someone confirms it one way or another, I
> think I'll adopt your convention for [Q] vs [O] for the remainder of
> the thread, just so we're both using the same convention. So my "holy"
> is [h8u-li] and my "wholly" is [hQuli].
Yup, [h8u-li] sounds RP to me all right. Well, [h@ulI] would sound RP,
but [h8u-li] would sound like a mock-RP by an Aussie.

> [oo in school]
> > For me, it's exactly identical to the vowel in 'put' but longer; I
> > have no idea of the exact quality of this vowel.
>
> 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] (called 'upsilon' in IPA-letter-naming
terminology, I believe, even though it doesn't resemble a Greek ypsilon.
Which I've spelt differently merely to illustrate the difference in the
two letters).

> Are you sure they're absolutely identical for you? I'm trying it that
> way and it sounds wrong, like some kind of foreign accent. Often the
> qualities of two vowels are hard to distinguish if one is always long
> and the other is always short, because length is the primary cue.
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) [@]). 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]. The vowel in 'boot' is more fronted (and long), but I wouldn't say
it was diphthongal. The vowel in 'foot' is the same as the 'full' vowel.
This is not, however, gospel.

Tristan.

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