Date:  Tue, 27 Jan 1998 11:40:35 -0800
From:  Garland D Bills <gbills[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]UNM.EDU>
Subject: Re: Phonetic transcription--help

On Tue, 27 Jan 1998, Alan Baragona wrote:
> I have a student with a Texas
> accent who, like many Southerners and Westerners, simplifies the
> diphthong [ai] (among others). But I can't really transcribe her vowel
> as either [a] or [ae]. Her pronunciation of <like> is not a homophone
> of either <lock> [lak] or <lack> [laek] but is pretty much smack in the
> middle, as if she stops in the middle of the glide or rather sets her
> mouth to say the glide but holds the pure vowel. I don't really know how
> to transcribe her <like> without an approximation that doesn't do her
> justice and can potentially confuse the class.

    As a native speaker of that same (standard, of course) dialect, it
seems to me your characterization is quite accurate. The IPA symbols for
the three vowels in our dialect are [ae] for <lack>, [a] for <like>, and
"script a" for which I'll use [[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]] for <lock>. In articulatory terms,
probably the simplist (and not really too oversimplified) description is
that all three are low vowels in front, central, and back positions
respectively. Phoneticians will probably make our lives more complicated
than this -- right, Don Lance?

Garland D. Bills                E-mail: gbills[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]unm.edu
Department of Linguistics            Tel.:  (505) 277-7416
University of New Mexico            FAX:  (505) 277-6355
Albuquerque, NM 87131-1196 USA