slang/slant

[Laurence Horn]

At 3:43 PM +0000 10/28/06, Tom Zurinskas wrote:
>For "slang" you say "sl&N?"  Strange notation.
>
>M-w.com foespelz (phonetically/phonemically spells) "fun" as "f&n", so in
>that notation you would be saying "slung" for "slang".  No one says that.

If you checked out the earlier posts (just yesterday, I believe)
about the ASCII representation of IPA, you'd have seen that & is used
in that system not for a schwa (or "caret") but for the low front
vowel for which the IPA symbol is the digraph corresponding to [ae].
Lots of ones say that for "slang", or at least something closer to
the lax vowel of "slant" than the tense vowel of "saint", including
many northeasterners like me.

>But you don't seem to be takingt his seriously ("the hell with it").  I've
>focused on it to get it right because of my phoneme analysis books.
>
>These things can be tested.  One can play the m-w.com spoken words for
>"dangle, danger, dants"  which one has the different "a" vowel sound.  I
>hear "dance" with a short vowel and the others with a long vowel. Thus the
>notation for "dangle" should be long a.

What does this "test" other than the pronunciation of whoever
happened to be used to record those words by m-w.com?

LH

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