Hearing the difference between /a,A,Q,O/

Guest   Sun Nov 04, 2007 2:48 pm GMT
Are there any tricks for telling the difference between the sounds /a/ /A/ /Q/ and /O/? They all sound rather the same to me.
Gabriel   Tue Nov 06, 2007 5:04 pm GMT
Do you mean to say that you confuse ALL four vowels or just [a] from [A] and [Q] from [O]? If it's the former, I'd be interested to know what your native language is.
Guest   Tue Nov 06, 2007 5:16 pm GMT
Might be a little O/T but where are the users in this forum getting their pronunciation schemes, or am I just viewing the forum with the wrong font encoding? The title of this thread is "Hearing the difference between /a,A,Q,O/"

What I see in my browser is: Hearing the difference between *then*

forward-slash lowercase-a, uppercase-A, uppercase-Q, uppercase-O forward-slash


Am I seeing this correctly in my browser? I often see similar attempts at transliterating English in this forum, but it all seems like just a bunch of slashes and upper and lowercase characters to me and doesn't make any sense. Is there a pronunciation key for all of this?
Lo   Tue Nov 06, 2007 6:11 pm GMT
Well, if he can't hear the difference between [A], [Q] and [O] he might be cot-caught merged. I have a hard time telling when someone not cot-caught merged speaks with me, I mean, I do notice there's something different, but I can't really spot what it is.
Gabriel   Tue Nov 06, 2007 7:09 pm GMT
But I'd say the difference between [a] and [O] is pretty striking, even for those C-C merged speakers who do not even have separate /A/ and /O/.
Lo   Tue Nov 06, 2007 8:09 pm GMT
Well yeah, I agree [a] and [O] are very different one another, and we don't have [a] in English at all
Gabriel   Tue Nov 06, 2007 9:06 pm GMT
<<Well yeah, I agree [a] and [O] are very different one another, and we don't have [a] in English at all >>

I'm sure many native speakers who contribute here regularly will disagree with that. Speakers with the NCVS will use [a] for GA [A], speakers in the north of England will use [a] for RP [{] in both TRAP and BATH words and some Canadians will use [a] in certain realizations of [{].
Lazar   Tue Nov 06, 2007 9:54 pm GMT
Guest #2: There's nothing wrong with your browser. The transcriptions in question are X-SAMPA, which is a way of writing the International Phonetic Alphabet with a standard ASCII keyboard. (Slashes indicate phonemic transcription, and brackets indicate phonetic transcription.) You can find a guide to IPA here ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPA ) and a guide to X-SAMPA here ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-SAMPA ).
Lo   Tue Nov 06, 2007 11:01 pm GMT
<<I'm sure many native speakers who contribute here regularly will disagree with that. Speakers with the NCVS will use [a] for GA [A], speakers in the north of England will use [a] for RP [{] in both TRAP and BATH words and some Canadians will use [a] in certain realizations of [{].>>

Oh well, not in my variety of English then, I'm sure it would sound really strange if bath and trap were pronounced with [a] instead of [{] to me.
Lazar   Tue Nov 06, 2007 11:41 pm GMT
In the Worcester-Boston accent, [a] tends to be used in words like "father", "spa", "car", and (for some speakers) in words like "bath, ask".

For my part, I have separate phonemes /A/=[A:] and /Q/=[Q:], and even I sometimes have trouble distinguishing between [A(:)] and [Q(:)] in the speech of other North Americans.

But I don't usually have trouble distinguishing those vowel qualities when I hear British people - probably because there's more of a consistent length distinction there, with [A:] versus [Q], and also because the British [Q] seems to be a bit more rounded, and sometimes closer, than my [Q:].
Travis   Wed Nov 07, 2007 12:20 am GMT
For another example of a vowel system involving [a], I myself (from Milwaukee, Wisconsin) at least have [a] for "father" and "spa", [A] for "car" (but I have heard people here with [Q] for "car") and sporadically for words historically containing /aU/, [Q] for "saw" and "thought", and [E_^{], [E_o], or [E] for "bath" and "ask". Actually, things aren't that simple, but I am not going to bother going into things in length here.