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A few English pronunciation questions | ||
Tags: Pronunciation | English | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| yong321 Groupie United States yong321.freeshe Joined 5544 days ago 80 posts - 104 votes  Studies: Spanish | Message 1 of 5 08 December 2012 at 8:17pm | IP Logged | ||
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Questions related to Edward Finegan & Nino Besnier's "Language: Its Structure and Use" (Words in brackets are mine.)
pp33-4 "the difference in the written vowels a and e [in words 'woman' and 'women'] does not represent a difference in pronunciation" <-- I disagree. They're pronounced [ə] and [ i ], respectively. p.48 "a [the IPA symbol] park (in Boston)" <-- The authors claim that when Bostonians say "park", the vowel is [a], not the more common [ɑ]. (To see the difference, refer to "IPA vowel chart" at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vowel) I believe English only has [ɑ], not [a], and many other languages mostly have [a]; French has both but most letter a's are pronounced [a]. p.48 "flooded [flʌdəd]" <-- I thought everybody pronounced [flʌdid]. Is [ə] here wrong, or it suggests a dialect? Edited by yong321 on 08 December 2012 at 8:19pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4709 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 2 of 5 08 December 2012 at 8:22pm | IP Logged | ||
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Flooded with an I just suggests stress on the latter syllable. It's been FLOODIDDDDD.
I usually don't pronounce the vowel that strongly. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| daegga Tetraglot Senior Member Austria lang-8.com/553301 Joined 4523 days ago 1076 posts - 1792 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Swedish, Norwegian Studies: Danish, French, Finnish, Icelandic | Message 3 of 5 08 December 2012 at 9:48pm | IP Logged | ||
IPA describes sounds in how they are produced, not the resulting acoustic signal. Different languages have different acoustic realizations of the sounds for example. Even in the same language, the realization of one sound varies and the properties of the acoustic signals overlap for adjacent vowels. In "woman/women", the <a> and the <e> are produced at the same place, but the original tongue position (for the <o>) might influence the actual sound (because the movement to the intended position for the schwa is different). So the <e> in "woman" might sound like an [ɪ] to you (I really don't think it sounds like an [ i ], but then again, different perception...I guess you don't differentiate between those two in English), but it is well in the range of a [ə] (but also in the range of an [ɪ]). But yeah, the [ə] in woman and women are not exactly the same, because the former stems from a centralization of an open vowel, the latter from the centralization of a close vowel. They are probably on almost opposite sides of the range for the schwa. Edited by daegga on 08 December 2012 at 9:51pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| yong321 Groupie United States yong321.freeshe Joined 5544 days ago 80 posts - 104 votes Studies: Spanish | Message 4 of 5 09 December 2012 at 4:30am | IP Logged | ||
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Thanks for correcting me on the [ɪ] part. I intended to say the second vowel in 'women' is [ɪ], not [ i ].
Overall, I think you're talking about different allophones ("acoustic realizations") for one phoneme (e.g. phoneme /p/ in 'pie' has an allophone [ph] where h should be printed as a superscript meaning aspirated, different from the allophone [ p ] in 'spy'). IPA, when used in allophones attempts to describe the "the resulting acoustic signal". But of course limited symbols cannot practically represent all, infinite, acoustic realizations, hence "attempts to". But in case of 'women', http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/women?s=t shows [wim-in] only (apparently they use [ i ] for [ɪ] of IPA). So I thought everyone pronounced it like ['wɪmɪn]. Then I checked my old Longman English dictionary, where IPA is strictly followed, the second vowel has [ɪ] printed over [ə], suggesting people could use either vowel. Maybe a small proportion of Americans pronounce [ə] and the authors of this book are among those people. Edited by yong321 on 09 December 2012 at 4:32am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| daegga Tetraglot Senior Member Austria lang-8.com/553301 Joined 4523 days ago 1076 posts - 1792 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Swedish, Norwegian Studies: Danish, French, Finnish, Icelandic | Message 5 of 5 09 December 2012 at 12:04pm | IP Logged | ||
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I don't think http://dictionary.reference.com uses IPA at all (eg. [woo m-uh n]), they seem to have their own system using English characters to approximate the pronunciation.
I think you are right, both can be used. In ESL you usually learn that all reduced vowels get centralized to a schwa, and I think I've read somewhere there is a tendency that more and more dialects follow that direction. Those few Americans I'm acquainted with all have the reduced vowels, but that's hardly representative. On Wikipedia is a nice article about the difference in dialects which fully reduce and which don't. But again, even if you pronounce both words with a schwa, the formants of the schwa might be a bit different, one being closer to the [ʊ] (or maybe to the [æ]), the other to the [ɪ]. I think it's purely convention where you set the borders between the sounds (especially in perception) Edited by daegga on 09 December 2012 at 12:12pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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