Low back vowel, [ ] vs / /

[Beverly Flanigan]

At 01:19 PM 5/30/00 -0400, you wrote:
>In a message dated 05/29/2000 5:57:24 PM Pacific Daylight Time,
>rtroike at U.ARIZONA.EDU writes:
>
><<  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].  >>
>
>
>My own central NY speech agrees with this analysis,-- there are two schwas in
>Bubba and two schwas in 'above' and I think the entire North and Northeast
>shares this feature.   The wedge was intended to describe a back vowel.
>Moreover it's a bad symbol for the RP vowel of 'luck'  But the argument for
>keeping two separate symbols comes from those dialects (southern I think--
>but I'm not sure which areas of the South) that do in fact have a back vowel
>in 'luck'-- so 'above' does have two different vowels.
>
>Dale Coye
>The College of NJ

Would you use a wedge in the (perhaps exaggerated) country-western song
pronunciation of "love"?  I've never known how to transcribe that.

_____________________________________________
Beverly Olson Flanigan         Department of Linguistics
Ohio University                     Athens, OH  45701
Ph.: (740) 593-4568              Fax: (740) 593-2967
http://www.cats.ohiou.edu/linguistics/dept/flanigan.htm