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From: rdd@usa1.com (Aaron J. Dinkin)
Subject: Re: Stressed schwa
Message-ID: <rdd-0308961643190001@dmn1-19.usa1.com>
Date: Sat, 03 Aug 1996 16:43:19 -0500
References: <rdd-0108960929350001@dmn1-37.usa1.com> <glen.838927095@heurikon.com> <3201C38E.7D97@eurocontrol.fr> <4tu3mu$ej7@riscsm.scripps.edu>
Lines: 57

In article <4tu3mu$ej7@riscsm.scripps.edu>, misrael@scripps.edu (Mark
Israel) wrote:

> In article <rdd-0208961047200001@dmn1-66.usa1.com>, rdd@usa1.com (Aaron
J. Dinkin) writes:
> 
> > I do distinguish "mention" from "men shun", but the vowel I use in "shun"
> > is not [V], a mid/low back unrounded vowel. I use [V"], a low/mid center
> > unrounded vowel, straight down from [@] and straight up from [a]. The
> > phoneme /V"/ could be described as a low center lax vowel, contrasting
> > with the low center tense vowel, /a/.
> 
>    _Phonetic Symbol Guide_ by Pullum and Ladusaw, a respected work, says:  
> 
> # The IPA transcription [V] was initially defined to represent the fully
> # back Cardinal 14, but one of its most common uses is for representing
> # the vowel sound of Southern British English _cup_.  Most descriptions
> # agree that this sound is central rather than back.
> 
>    Every ASCII IPA user except Aaron Dinkin uses [V] and [V"] so that in 
> British Received Pronunciation, "fun" is /fVn/ and "fern" is /fV"n/.  By 
> using [V"] for the sound that everybody else is notating as [V], Aaron is 
> doing nothing but confusing people.  I have already taken Aaron to task 
> for this by e-mail, but he is obstinate.

In your e-mail, you said:

> You are consistently using [V"] where I believe you mean [V].
> [V] is [<turned v>]; [V"] is [<reverse epsilon>].
> In British Received Pronunciation, "fun" is /fVn/ and "fern"
> is /fV":n/.

I (naturally enough, I think) interpreted this to mean that you believed I
pronounced "fun" with "Cardinal 14", which I do not. According to the
ASCII IPA chart at Evan Kirschenbaum's web page, [V"] is the only symbol
that represents a central vowel higher than [a] but lower that [@]. The
vowel I use in such words as "fun" is the IPA "turned a", which can only
be represented by [V"] in the ASCII IPA. Now, however, you tell me that,
for reasons apparently unknown, the symbol [V] is used to represent the
low center lax unrounded vowel.

I believed, for all this time, that RP speakers pronounced "fun"
differently than I did, and now I find out that they pronounce it the
same, but use a character that represents a different vowel. Therefore, I
believe the question is not why I use [V"] where I mean [V], but why you
use [V] where you mean [V"]. Question: how do you represent the back
central lax unrounded vowel?

ATTENTION: henceforward I shall use the ASCII character V to represent the
phone represented in the IPA by "turned a", rather than "turned v" as it
is in the system devised by Evan Kirschenbaum.

Thank you for clearing this up for me, Mark, but please answer the
questions I've posed.

-Aaron J. Dinkin
Dr. Whom

