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From: pardoej@lonnds.ml.com (Julian Pardoe LADS LDN X1428)
Subject: Re: Chain Shift (was Tendency of Inflections to Disappear)
Message-ID: <DvAsBt.4ow@tigadmin.ml.com>
Sender: usenet@tigadmin.ml.com (News Account)
Reply-To: pardoej@lonnds.ml.com
Organization: Merrill Lynch Europe
References: <4tac7o$r22@thighmaster.admin.lsa.umich.edu>
Date: Mon, 29 Jul 1996 09:14:16 GMT
Lines: 51

In article <4tac7o$r22@thighmaster.admin.lsa.umich.edu>, jlawler@snoopy.ling.lsa.umich.edu (John Lawler) writes:
-->Philip Hunt  <phil@vision25.demon.co.uk> writes:
-->>John Lawler <jlawler@umich.edu> writes
-->
-->>>I can't give you a good diagram of Am English vowels in ASCII,
-->>>but if I could, it would go something like this:
-->
-->>>           Front               Central              Back
-->>>
-->>>High         [i] "beet"                          "boot" [u]
-->>>                 "bit" [I]                     [U] "foot"
-->>>Mid            [e] "fail"                      "boat" [o]
-->>>                "fell" [E]       "but" [@]     [O] "bought" *
-->>>Low                  "sad" [ae]            [a] "sod" *
-->
-->>Is there also a /@:/ phoneme, or do "bird" and "bud" sound the same to
-->>Americans?
-->
-->Here we go with phonemes again.  I would represent "bird" as /b@rd/
-->in either AmEng or RP, and "bud" as /b@d/.  Vowel length is of course used to
-->distinguish the two in RP, while retroflexion is the norm in
-->rhotic AmEng; but either can be represented by the phoneme /r/
-->postvocalically.  That's the *point* of phonemes.  They refer to an
-->abstract level of segmentation and identity that's not so
-->tightly bound to the actual phonetic realization.

I take it that "RP" refers to UK "received pronounciation".

To me as a speaker of "coarsened" RP it is not the identification of the
vowel in RP "bird" as a long schaw /@:/ but the identification of the vowel
in "bud" as any kind of schwa.  To me there three separate sounds, as in the
first syllables of "bird", "bud" and "banana".  "Bud" has a sound quite
different to the other two.  (I believe the IPA symbol is converted lower-
case "v".)

I always find American descriptions of the sounds of English confusing
because
   /b@d/ is a confusing representation of "bud"
   /sad/ is a confusing representation of "sod"

Where does the sound of "father" fit in the above scheme?

I can see where ideas that AmEng has a missing phoneme comes from.
There are *two* places where the above table seems to have two symbols
to cover three sounds:
   bird, bud, banana
   sod, father, bought

-- jP --


