Ask any English speaker how he pronounces the vowel “a”. There are about seven or more correct answers, though I can’t think of them all right now. Consider the various “a” sounds here:
What day 1 does Mary 2 plan 3 to eat 4 the awesome 5 avocado 6,7 ?
I'd insert before the ‘?’: "outside the c
athedr
al
8,9".
In the early International Phonetic Alphabet, a French invention credited mostly to Paul Edouard
Passy, the sounds italicized & numbered above would have been indicated, at an intermediate stage of development between the World Wars [
*], by these distinct characters, in which no modifications to typographic style are allowed [†]:
1: d
ei, exemplifying the English
long-a, whose sound is signified in the Francocentric IPA by its "ei" diphthong (consider pronunciation of Latin
"Dei" at various speeds).
2: M
ɛə ɹi (U+25B U+259; ɛ ə).
3: pl
æn (U+E6 æ).
4:
iː t (‘i’ U+02D0; ‘i’ ː: the IPA triangular colon, which the IPA uses instead of the familiar macron to signify the
long pronumciation of a vowel, altho' common screen resolutions make it difficult to distinguish from the ordinary
colon ‘
:’).
5:
ɔː sʌm (U+0254 U+02D0; ɔ ː: where the letter apparently a
turned-c is actually the vowel
open-o) (also, altho' not under discussion, the
short-u ‘
ʌ’: U+028C ʌ).
6,7:
ævoc
ɑː do (U+E6 æ U+0251 U+02D0; ɑ ː).
8,9: c
əθiːdr
əl (both
schwa: U+0259; ə), as if an alternative English spelling were "c'thedr'l" (also, altho' not under discussion, the
voiceless-th of
theta: U+03B8 θ, which Germanophiles & Celtophiles probably prefer to replace by their runic
thorn ‘
þ’, as assimilated into the Latin alphabet: U+FE þ).
And to provide further frustration among learners of English, the final ‘
a’ in "avoc
ado" is pronounced differently from the final ‘
a’ in "avoc
ation"; the latter uses the ‘a’ sound that in English is its
long-a (i.e., the sound signified in the IPA by its
diphthong "
ei").
-------
Note
*:
Cassell's New Fr.-En. En.-Fr. Dictionary, (c)1930. The
International Phonetic Alphabet of the time, then often called "Passy's Alphabet", is listed with examples, on p. x--xi. I verified the examples quoted above by referring to entries in its En.-Fr. section. The IPA underwent later episodes of revision and update, e.g., 1993 and 1996 (respectively), and maybe even early in the 21
st Century.
Note †: No modifications in
styles of IPA characters were allowed because the alphabet was implemented by low-tech methods such as turning or mutilating printers'
movable types (e.g., ‘ɑ’ being produced by cutting the ascender off a ‘d’). At the time of the reference work above, the distinct shape that might be called the
crested-a, common in printing English (i.e., the ‘a’ in
upright Arial or Helvetica, but not all other
sans-serif fonts), was not used by the IPA to signify any sound of ‘a’ in English, but it was used for some sounds of ‘a’ in French.
Topic: Spelling Challenge (Read 9139 times)