Low back vowel, [ ] vs / /

[Herb Stahlke]

I'm not southern, unless you extend that to south of Detroit, but I have two different vowels in "above," which I've usually transcribe as [@b^v], but that's using the old IPA.  See the chart on p. 198 of the second edition of Ladefoged's A Course in Phonetics.  That symbol has been replaced by the inverted-a, and [^] is now the lower mid back vowel found in some southern dialects, a vowel I don't have.  But this only changes the terms of the debate.  [@] and /inverted-a/ still have to be kept distinct for northern and midwestern English.

Herb Stahlke

>>> Dfcoye at AOL.COM 05/30/00 12:19PM >>>
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