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Lull, gull, dull: [lʌɫ gʌɫ dʌɫ]
Full, pull, bull: [fəɫ pəɫ bəɫ]

This comes from a conversation with my sister, in which she kept referencing [tʃif dəɫ nəɪ̯f kɑɫɨdʒ]. I eventually said, "You say [dəɫ] instead of [dʌɫ]?"

Now, my sister is not at all interested in phonetics. There is no reason she should have better allophone-distinction abilities than your average GA English speaker.

But she immediately heard the difference, and after thinking for a second, replied that she used [dəɫ] in the phrase "Chief Dull Knife College" and [dʌɫ] everywhere else.

Another example: there is a local ski run called "Hully Gully." My sister and I both say ['hʌɫi 'gʌɫi] but my brother says ['həɫi 'gəɫi]. Again, we were both able to notice this difference (I hadn't really started learning about phonetics back then).

Obviously this distinction collapses is the vast majority of English words (basically, anywhere except right before /l/). But I still thought it was interesting. Does anybody else have this distinction?

In General American, the contrast that you are initially describing is between historical /ʌl/ and /ʊl/, with lull, gull, and dull having the former and full, pull, and bull having the latter.

As for [ʌ] versus [ə] before /l/ in stressed syllables in words that have historical /ʌl/, though, that is more just a minor phonetic detail of the particular varieties the members of your family speak.

Note that said historical phonemes do not necessarily correspond to the particular phones one has synchronically. I for instance have [ˈʟ̞ʌ(ː)ɯ̞̯]~[ˈɰʌ(ː)ɯ̞̯], [ˈɡ̊ʌ(ː)ɯ̞̯], and [ˈd̥ʌ(ː)ɯ̞̯] for lull, gull and dull versus [ˈfɯ̞(ː)], [ˈpʰɯ̞(ː)], and [ˈb̥ɯ̞(ː)] for full, pull, and bull, and yet these still correspond to historical /ʌl/ versus /ʊl/ respectively.

Does anybody else have this distinction?

I don't. I never quite got the difference between /V/ and /@/, really.

As Travis notes, this is a contrast between "/ʌ/" and "/ʊ/", not /ə/. Now, in my experience, many speakers of American English pronounce /ʊ/ very centralized, lowered, and unrounded. Mine is quite close to [ə] in fact. But it's not what people mean when they're talking about and /ʌ/~/ə/ contrast.

Also, I and many other speakers have syllabic /l/ for the words in that second set: [fɫ̩], [pʰɫ̩], etc.

Yeah, the distinction you're describing is definitely /ʌl/ vs /ʊl/ for me. No schwa involved.



(Though since I have very strong schwa-fronting, my /ə/ and /ʌ/ don't sound alike at all; if anything it's my /ə/ and /ɪ/ that merge everywhere except word-finally)

Normally when one speaks of a contrast between /ə/ and /ʌ/ in an Anglic variety, what one is speaking of is a contrast between a plain, reduced-vowel /ə/ and instances of /ʌ/ specifically arising from the split of (non-northern) Early New English /ʊ/ existing in unstressed syllables. This is definitely not that.

In my own dialect one can speak of a contrast between /ər/ and /ʌr/ existing, but this is a completely different matter. This is rather historical (stressed) /ɜr/ and (unstressed) /ər/ contrasting with historical /ɑːr/, where historical /ɑːr/ has since undergone Canadian Raising to [ʌ(ː)ʁˤ], but due to dialect borrowings and learned words, instances of [ɑ(ː)ʁˤ] still exist in environments where they could have been raised.

Lyanna wrote:Obviously this distinction collapses is the vast majority of English words (basically, anywhere except right before /l/). But I still thought it was interesting. Does anybody else have this distinction?

Wha? What you're calling /ə/ (which is usually called /ʊ/) occurs all over the place: good, foot, soot, rook, would, should, etc. Most accents distinguish it from /ʌ/, except Northern England.

dunomapuka wrote:

Lyanna wrote:Obviously this distinction collapses is the vast majority of English words (basically, anywhere except right before /l/). But I still thought it was interesting. Does anybody else have this distinction?

Wha? What you're calling /ə/ (which is usually called /ʊ/) occurs all over the place: good, foot, soot, rook, would, should, etc. Most accents distinguish it from /ʌ/, except Northern England.

That's just the thing. The vowel I have in pull is definitely not the same as the one I have in good, foot, et cetera. I guess historically it was (didn't realize that before, thanks guys).

Although, now that I've read Whimemsz's post, I think I probably have syllabic /l/ in those words rather than schwa followed by /l/.

I'm fairly sure that the majority of the people with my dialect have merged [V,U] with [O] before [l]. So pull/poll and gull/goal sound exactly the same.

IMD, pull, school, etc. all have [L\=] (IPA: [ʟ̩]), which I usually phonemically analyse as /@l/ but does sound very close to /Ul/. Maybe you're confusing a syllabic lateral with some vowel?

Whoops, someone already got it, I should read all the posts.... :\ sorry

Zoris wrote:IMD, pull, school, etc. all have [L\=] (IPA: [ʟ̩]), which I usually phonemically analyse as /@l/ but does sound very close to /Ul/. Maybe you're confusing a syllabic lateral with some vowel?

"School"? IMD that has /ul/.

I have a (rounded) syllabic lateral for /Ul/ and [V5] for /@l/.

Nortaneous wrote:

Zoris wrote:IMD, pull, school, etc. all have [L\=] (IPA: [ʟ̩]), which I usually phonemically analyse as /@l/ but does sound very close to /Ul/. Maybe you're confusing a syllabic lateral with some vowel?

"School"? IMD that has /ul/.

I have a (rounded) syllabic lateral for /Ul/ and [V5] for /@l/.

I have /ul/ realized as [L\=] and /ur/ as [Or\]. So "school" is [skL\=], "skull" is [sk6L\], "tour" is [tOr\] and "tore" is also [tOr\].

Oh, so you merge /U u/ before /l/?

Lyanna wrote:Lull, gull, dull: [lʌɫ gʌɫ dʌɫ]
Full, pull, bull: [fəɫ pəɫ bəɫ]

The latter all have [ʊ] for me, but IANANS. I don't mean to hijack the thread, but what I'd be more interested in is whether there are any minimal pairs for [ʌ] and [ɑ], also [ɔ] and [ɒ], because I don't consciously distinguish between them, but instead lump them under /a/ and /ɔ/ respectively.

Hmm... if the above is accurate, these are some interesting shifts before /l/ - but I would want to see more before I can really comment on them.

I for one have a rather conventional set of distinctions of back vowels before /l/ in stressed syllables for an NAE variety close to General American, even though the realizations thereof may not be all too GA-like:

historical /ɒl/ > [a(ː)ɯ̞̯]
historical /ʌl/ > [ʌ(ː)ɯ̞̯] or in certain words* [ɒ(ː)ʊ̯]
historical /ɔːl/ > [ɒ(ː)ʊ̯]
historical /oʊ̯l/ > [o(ː)ʊ̯]
historical /ʊl/ > [ɯ̞(ː)]
historical /uːl/ > [u(ː)ʊ̯]

* such as bulb, gulf, multi-, and ultra

Having seen this question come up before I've already made up my mind, though I may be wrong, it's still what I believe.

When I was young I thought that /ʊ/ and /ə/ were the same vowel, because I had no exposure to professional phonetics, but I had taken lessons in school which told us that the vowel of pull/bull/full/wool was "short oo" (basically a digraph "oo" with a big "stretched breve" diacritic that makes it look something like owl eyes) even though its pronunciation was essentially [ə]. I would say that (for my dialect at least) there's no reason to call it /ʊ/ other than to make it fit within a system that claims there are no stressed schwas in English. It has quite a limited distribution, seemingly restricted to just labial + vowel + /l/ and a few French loans ("Coeur (D'Alene)", though many people probably just have syllabic r for that), but then, the same could be said of other English vowels, including the "a" of father, and also /ʊ/ itself, and I don't generally see people saying they're not phonetic.

I would say that there are minimal pairs for /ə/ versus /ʌ/ such as "roses" versus "Rosa's" as well. Though apparently some people merge even these. There are probably no true minimal pairs for /ʊ/ vs /ə/, so maybe they could be phonetically unified after all, but there is still at least a hypothetical difference between an unstressed word with /ʊ/ like "shot-put" and the vowel of the -u- in Connecticut.

Soap wrote:Having seen this question come up before I've already made up my mind, though I may be wrong, it's still what I believe.

When I was young I thought that /ʊ/ and /ə/ were the same vowel, because I had no exposure to professional phonetics, but I had taken lessons in school which told us that the vowel of pull/bull/full/wool was "short oo" (basically a digraph "oo" with a big "stretched breve" diacritic that makes it look something like owl eyes) even though its pronunciation was essentially [ə]. I would say that (for my dialect at least) there's no reason to call it /ʊ/ other than to make it fit within a system that claims there are no stressed schwas in English. It has quite a limited distribution, seemingly restricted to just labial + vowel + /l/ and a few French loans ("Coeur (D'Alene)", though many people probably just have syllabic r for that), but then, the same could be said of other English vowels, including the "a" of father, and also /ʊ/ itself, and I don't generally see people saying they're not phonetic.

The reason to call it /ʊ/ is that it was historically that, and there are dialects that still preserve similar realizations. Also, you forget that /ʊ/ is also found elsewhere, being the vowel phoneme in words like book, cook, put, pudding, took, shook, and so on in both General American and Received Pronunciation.

Soap wrote:I would say that there are minimal pairs for /ə/ versus /ʌ/ such as "roses" versus "Rosa's" as well. Though apparently some people merge even these. There are probably no true minimal pairs for /ʊ/ vs /ə/, so maybe they could be phonetically unified after all, but there is still at least a hypothetical difference between an unstressed word with /ʊ/ like "shot-put" and the vowel of the -u- in Connecticut.

Roses versus Rosa's is actually /ɪ/ (realized as [ɨ]) versus /ə/, I should note.