Wedge and schwa

[Randy Alexander]

On Mon, Mar 9, 2009 at 11:15 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
> At 2:15 PM +0000 3/8/09, ronbutters at aol.com wrote:
>>I am confused about the difference between wedge and schwa. I
>>thought the former was just a conventional way of indicating the
>>latter. Explain?
>
> They are different vowels in the IPA; the wedge is both further back
> (as the unrounded counterpart of open-o) and a bit lower (or more
> "open") than the schwa. Â This doesn't reflect the fact that many
> transcribers use schwa for unstressed vowels and wedge for the vowel
> of "cup".

Wedge in American phonetic usage is used traditionally to represent a
sound that is opener than schwa: a not quite fully open, central
unrounded vowel.  In current standard IPA, that sound would be
represented by turned A.

Ron, I'm a little surprised that just a week or so after you objected
to the idea that schwa represents a region of sounds, you're now
saying you weren't even sure of the difference between it an another
sound.

In M-W, <schwa> represents the schwa sound(s), and [turned a].

--
Randy Alexander
Jilin City, China
My Manchu studies blog:
http://www.bjshengr.com/manchu

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