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From: alderson@netcom8.netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III)
Subject: Re: Has the IPA "inverted V" moved?
In-Reply-To: exw6sxq@ix.netcom.com's message of Mon, 05 Aug 1996 10:46:39 GMT
Message-ID: <ALDERSON.96Aug5113347@netcom8.netcom.com>
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Date: Mon, 5 Aug 1996 18:33:47 GMT
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In article <3205cbe0.106291024@nntp.ix.netcom.com> exw6sxq@ix.netcom.com
(Bob Cunningham) writes:

>Someone in a Usenet posting has suggested that the IPA "inverted V" is no
>longer the low, back, unrounded phoneme that is shown in the 1979 and 1989
>versions of the International Phonetic Alphabet, but that it has been moved to
>a low, central, unrounded position.

>Can anyone tell me of an announcement that has been published to that effect
>by the International Phonetic Association or any other responsible and
>influential organization?

This symbol was used in all the classes I took as a *central* vowel, differen-
tiated from <shwa> in that the former could stand under accent.  It was not
until recent threads on sci.lang/a.u.e that I learned that it "should be" used
for a mid back unrounded vowel, rather than mid central unrounded.

A quick check in Pullum & Ladusaw shows that the confusion is an old one, going
back to the 50s at least.  It is likely that the source for the usage in my
experience was Chomsky & Halle, their followers and opponents.

So the answer to the question above is "No, we linguists just fucked it up..."
-- 
Rich Alderson   You know the sort of thing that you can find in any dictionary
                of a strange language, and which so excites the amateur philo-
                logists, itching to derive one tongue from another that they
                know better: a word that is nearly the same in form and meaning
                as the corresponding word in English, or Latin, or Hebrew, or
                what not.
                                                --J. R. R. Tolkien,
alderson@netcom.com                               _The Notion Club Papers_
