Stressed /ə/ in English

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Travis B.
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Re: Stressed /ə/ in English

Post by Travis B. »

Personally I would prefer to not make reference to GA with regard to how actual people speak, and to treat it as purely an idealized standard variety.
Dibotahamdn duthma jallni agaynni ra hgitn lakrhmi.
Amuhawr jalla vowa vta hlakrhi hdm duthmi xaja.
Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro.

gmalivuk
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Re: Stressed /ə/ in English

Post by gmalivuk »

To be fair, a teacher in a language-related field hardly counts as a random person when it comes to linguistic questions. I wouldn't care if I had, say, an Uber driver who thought the PEN vowel should be written as /e/ in a pronunciation guide, but when it was my CELTA trainer, it was rather frustrating.

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Zaarin
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Re: Stressed /ə/ in English

Post by Zaarin »

Travis B. wrote:Personally I would prefer to not make reference to GA with regard to how actual people speak, and to treat it as purely an idealized standard variety.
My dialect is so eclectic that I honestly don't know how else to describe it. It's definitely American. It's rooted in the Northeast (my parents are both from western New York), but I'm inclined to say it has more Western than Northeastern features (I definitely notice that people from my Mom's part of New York have an accent different from mine)--perhaps picked up from my time at an international school in South Korea*. Despite a number of years lived in the South, however, I'm pleased to say that I have virtually no Southernisms (both places I've lived in the South have essentially been non-Southern enclaves with very minimal contact with people with Southern accents).

*My mom will tell you that I answer yes/no questions the Korean way. For example, "Aren't you hungry?" "Yes." = "Yes, I'm not hungry." (I have no idea if a negative yes is part of the Korean language, but it was apparently part of the English of many of our Korean-speaking students.)
"But if of ships I now should sing, what ship would come to me,
What ship would bear me ever back across so wide a Sea?”

Travis B.
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Re: Stressed /ə/ in English

Post by Travis B. »

But eclectic General American does not make. GA is either an idealized standard, or a variety spoken in a certain part of Iowa, or a very general description for a wide range of varieties that do not even share the same vowel system. Of course the last is too general to be of any use, and it is questionable whether anyone speaks the first, and the middle is spoken by sufficiently few people that it is like giving a special name to certain registers of speech here in Milwaukee.
Dibotahamdn duthma jallni agaynni ra hgitn lakrhmi.
Amuhawr jalla vowa vta hlakrhi hdm duthmi xaja.
Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro.

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Zaarin
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Re: Stressed /ə/ in English

Post by Zaarin »

I suppose when it comes to American dialects, I tend to be a lumper rather than a splitter. Outside of the South and the Northeast, most American dialects sound pretty similar to me.
"But if of ships I now should sing, what ship would come to me,
What ship would bear me ever back across so wide a Sea?”

Travis B.
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Re: Stressed /ə/ in English

Post by Travis B. »

On the other hand I can tell apart people's accents just in southeastern Wisconsin and northeastern Illinois alone... (e.g. each member of my immediate family, along with my ex, speaks somewhat differently from one another). They especially vary in their vowels, such that one cannot posit any single set of vowels just for southeastern Wisconsin alone.
Dibotahamdn duthma jallni agaynni ra hgitn lakrhmi.
Amuhawr jalla vowa vta hlakrhi hdm duthmi xaja.
Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro.

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mèþru
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Re: Stressed /ə/ in English

Post by mèþru »

GA for me can mean any of three based off of the context, but it usually refers to one of the first two.
ìtsanso, God In The Mountain, may our names inspire the deepest feelings of fear in urkos and all his ilk, for we have saved another man from his lies! I welcome back to the feast hall kal, who will never gamble again! May the eleven gods bless him!
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