stressed schwa in (American) English

User avatar
Pittsboy
Posts:1515
Joined:2002-06-28, 5:42
Real Name:Thiago do Nascimento
Gender:male
Location:Toronto, Canada
Country:CACanada (Canada)

Postby Pittsboy » 2003-09-20, 23:06

Anonymous wrote:schwa symbol can be used for reversed-a sound...

Phonetic Symbol Guide, 2nd edition, Chicago University Press
page 48


Just take German as ab example Mr. Unknown Guest, German has both /@/ and /turned a/ SO, it means depending on the language you are decribing you cannot fool around with both!!
"It is no good to try to stop knowledge from going forward. Ignorance is never better than knowledge."
~~Enrico Fermi (1901 - 1954)~~

User avatar
Pittsboy
Posts:1515
Joined:2002-06-28, 5:42
Real Name:Thiago do Nascimento
Gender:male
Location:Toronto, Canada
Country:CACanada (Canada)

Postby Pittsboy » 2003-09-20, 23:20

Anonymous wrote:as for brazilian NH being pronounced differently than spanish Ñ or italian/french GN or lusitanian NH (copyright: Thaïs C. Silva, Fonética e fonologia de português)

Image

as for schwa:

Gleason does not distinguish Imagefrom Imageand describes Image as mid central or back. (Phonetic Symbol Guide)


You see, Thais's book is SO correct that she uses the [y] which happens to be the rounded counterpart of [i] (a vowel) instead of [j] which would be the correct symbol for that pourpose!! NH in Brazilian Portuguese has, like, three different realizations, as a 1) nasal velar (like in "sing"), 2) nasal palatal and 3) the nasalized [j]...
When you stress you vocal apparatus it makes your tongue go a little farther from its original setting when pronouncing a schwa /@/ and it becomes more back, quite the same position as for the /^/ of English , that's why sometimes you can say a stressed schwa is a /^/, indeed if you take a look on any gppd dictionary it will give you that "but" is pronounced [b@t] in unstressed position and [b^t] in stressed position!
"It is no good to try to stop knowledge from going forward. Ignorance is never better than knowledge."

~~Enrico Fermi (1901 - 1954)~~

User avatar
Psi-Lord
Posts:10081
Joined:2002-08-18, 7:02
Real Name:Marcel Q.
Gender:male
Location:Cândido Mota
Country:BRBrazil (Brasil)
Contact:

Postby Psi-Lord » 2003-09-20, 23:36

Pittsboy wrote:Mr. Unknown Guest

It's not hard to find out who he is, hehehe...

Pittsboy wrote:You see, Thais's book is SO correct that she uses the [y] which happens to be the rounded counterpart of [i] (a vowel) instead of [j] which would be the correct symbol for that pourpose!!

This book confused the heck out of me when our ex-teacher decided we should use its tables — the symbols didn't just match with those we'd learnt... :( You can probably recall it, as you were the first one who told me to blow Thaïs away. :D
português do Brasil (pt-BR)British English (en-GB) galego (gl) português (pt) •• العربية (ar) български (bg) Cymraeg (cy) Deutsch (de)  r n km.t (egy) español rioplatense (es-AR) 日本語 (ja) 한국어 (ko) lingua Latina (la) ••• Esperanto (eo) (grc) français (fr) (hi) magyar (hu) italiano (it) polski (pl) Türkçe (tr) 普通話 (zh-CN)

User avatar
TaylorS
Posts:1013
Joined:2008-10-30, 13:56
Real Name:Taylor Selseth
Gender:male
Location:Moorhead-Fargo
Country:USUnited States (United States)

Re: stressed schwa in (American) English

Postby TaylorS » 2008-12-22, 7:10

Phonologically, General American English has 2 central phoneme, /ɜ/, with the schwa [ə] being an allophone of /ɜ/ in unstressed syllables, and the R-colored vowel /ɝ/, with the rhotic schwa [ɚ] in unstressed syllables. In fast speech vowels tend to become reduced to or near [ə] in unstressed syllables, or even disappear entirely.

So [ə] is NOT a phoneme in American English, it is unstressed realization of other vowel phonemes
Native: English
Learning: Spanish, Latin

Linguistic Interests: Historical Linguistics, Typology, Phonology, Phonetics, Morphology.


Return to “General Language Forum”

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 7 guests