Low back vowel, [ ] vs / /

[Rudolph C Troike]

Dennis, Herb, et al.

        In my South Texan English, and among most Texans I've heard, the
[^] does not occur as a stressed variant of [@] (schwa). I've always felt,
from the vantage point of my own variety and linguistic intuition, that
American linguists (and more often non-linguists from the field of Speech)
simply copied the British phonetic distinction and imported it into what
was intended to be a phonemic transcription. Ergo, I would transcribe
_above_ as either /@b at v/ or /^b^v/, never */@b^v/. Either way,
phonetically it is [@b at v], NOT [@b^v]. However, in the past I've had
Speech-type folk argue with me that it HAD to be transcribed [@b^v] or
/@b^v/ (not recognizing any difference in the intent of the transcription)
"because that was the way it was" in the authoritative textbooks they had
studied. If the symbol <^> is used _phonemically_ as distinct from <@>,
then a separate symbol should be used for every other stressed vs
unstressed vowel variant (to be sure, many unstressed vowels _tend_ toward
schwa, though not all make it).
        I see a similar problem in the discussion of "open o". There is a
real tense:lax contrast between this [)] in "caught" and the low-back
vowel of "hot" in at least some varieties of British English ("RP" at
least). In my speech, the vowel of "hot" having moved to low central
position, the undiphthongized vowel of "caught" lowers to lower-mid back,
but never to the low back position of British "hot". _Phonemically_, as
there is only one vowel in the lower-mid to lower-back position, it is
somewhat free to wander as to exact height, since there is no contrast
(the classic phonemic principle). There is also, in my speech, no longer
any tense:lax contrast, although the New York raised onset and the
Southern raised offset (glide), which are mirror images of one another,
are clearly reflexes of the original tenseness. [I have long thought that
the NYC raised onset, or "breaking", was an Italian influence, as this
happens with the parallel vowel in Romance.]
        If one is talking about phonetics, that is one thing; if about
phonemics, quite another. Where one puts a phoneme on a chart, or what
symbol one chooses for it, is a very different matter than arguing about
the phonetic norm or variation of actual pronunciations.

        --Rudy, where it's 111 or so today