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From: alderson@netcom15.netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III)
Subject: Re: English [&]
In-Reply-To: Colin Fine's message of Wed, 16 Oct 1996 00:53:32 +0100
Message-ID: <ALDERSON.96Oct16144631@netcom15.netcom.com>
Sender: alderson@netcom15.netcom.com
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References: <S5t9RsA8PCZyEw4z@kindness.demon.co.uk>
Date: Wed, 16 Oct 1996 21:46:31 GMT
Lines: 19

In article <S5t9RsA8PCZyEw4z@kindness.demon.co.uk> Colin Fine
<colin@kindness.demon.co.uk> writes:

>Every description I've come across of the vowel in Southern English 'cat'
>identifies it as the low front vowel [&]. (eg 'a short vowel between cardinal
>[E] and cardinal [a]' - J.D.O'Connor, "Phonetics" (Pelican 1973). I take this
>to be approximately the same vowel as German a".

No, the German a-umlaut varies between cardinal 2 and cardinal 3, where the
cardinal vowels 1-2-3-4 are [i e E &] in ASCII notation.  Cardinal 4 is the
American Network Standard pronunciation of "hat" and "cat" and the like, a bit
more tense vowel than the RP standard pronunciation.

The cardinal vowel chart really doesn't handle central vowels very well.
-- 
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_
