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Am I the only one who finds those pronunciation guides to often be wildly inaccurate?
According to this one, the "a" in "ass-" is pronounced exactly the same as the "e" in "-er-".
Not even RP-indoctrinated BBC newsreaders would pronounce it this way.
All I know is, I have nevuhr fallen on my uhss while skating.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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That's why dictionaries and folks talking about pronunciation ought to use the IPA ( link), though the latter often fight its adoption. The first a in asseverate is a schwa /ə/ ( link). I have observed that most ad hoc pronunciation "systems" in the States use uh (as did Garu) to represent this sound, but in the UK they use er. This sometimes leads to confusion.
Ceci n'est pas un seing.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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A skater on this board and one that never fell. Wow!
While jumping from one shwa-link to another I came across the words dialect-sociolect-idiolect. Interesting.
Then half way down a schwa-blog from a schwa specialist I ventured to read the last line. There was his final conclusion:
"I suspect that we will not have a satisfying theory of schwa untill we have a satisfying Theory of Everything."
I decided to skipp the second half of the article untill they have.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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I have observed that most ad hoc pronunciation "systems" in the States use uh (as did Garu) to represent this sound, but in the UK they use er. This sometimes leads to confusion. Terry Gross ran an old interview with Lynn Redgrave on Fresh Air today. In it Ms. Redgrave recounts how her father used to constantly correct her intrusive Rs in such words as "sawr" as in "I sawr a bird today." This is a fairly common feature of many non-rhotic dialects. My thought was that the intrusive Rs were just making up for all the Rs that were left out. See the above example, which would have been pronounced something like "I sawr a behd today."
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old hand
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old hand
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Or "I sawr a behd turday."
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Carpal Tunnel
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Or "I sawr a behd turday." Well, there you go. Are you pronouncing that R in turday or is it just a marker indicating some alteration of the pronunciation of the O in today? Some marker incomprehensible to us rhoticists.
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newbie
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"I sawr a behd turday."
That would be a Scouse accent...especially if by "behd" (bayyyyyd...drag it out for about 4 seconds) you mean "bird". Recall John Lennon in the Beatles' "Day in the Life": "I sawr a film turday, oh boy,...".
So is this schwa stuff telling us that the same /ə/ symbol is used for entirely different vowels? That's kinda confusing, is it not?
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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So is this schwa stuff telling us that the same /ə/ symbol is used for entirely different vowels? That's kinda confusing, is it not?
No. A schwa is a schwa. It's the other "systems" that can be confusing and ambiguous. I was just saying that the same sound in UK and American General English is represented in two different ways, the former with er and the latter with uh. (The most famous example of this is in Winnie the Pooh where the reader is admonished that it is not "Winnie thge Pooh", but "Winnie ther Pooh". Most folks from rhotic dialects end up pronouncing the second ther as /ðə/, when the author clearly had in mind the second of two possible pronunciations of the, i.e., /ði:/ and /ðə/.
Are you saying that you do not pronounce the first a in asseverate as a schwa? What do you pronounce it as? FWIW, the OED online gives the pronunciation (in IPA) as /ə'sɛvreɪt/. The first syllable is clearly a schwa.
Ceci n'est pas un seing.
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newbie
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I do pronounce it as a schwa - that's if the definition in the link you gave me has any real utility: "like the 'a' in about".
Problem is, how I/we pronounce the schwa 'a' in "about" might not be the same as how you or anyone else does. Nothing can be trusted when it's merely represented as a textual character, a symbol or schwa definition. You have to hear an actual spoken sound before you can truly say, "yes, that's how I pronounce it too".
For example, if something was defined as: "like the 'ou' in about", Canadians would read this completely differently to the rest of us. South ("Syth") Dubliners would read it differently again.
Our "schwa a" is a very flat, somewhat extended ah, verging on aah; you have to momentarily widen your mouth, as if into a smile or grimace, to say it. It's not a posh, round-mouthed aw, nor a dropped-chin doctor's "ahh", not a grunted uh, not a clipped o'h, not a rhotic ar, not eh, not er, nor any other of dozens of other permutations. But here I am, trying to _describe_ it to you; it's almost futile. If I had training in the dictionary sybolism you use, I might succeed, but anyway I'm still not convinced that the sybolism has standardised sound correspondence.
I think that what we can do, at least, is be critical of cases where very different sounds are assigned the same pronunciation guide sound: that's why I started this thread. However hard it is to pin down these sounds, we can at least agree that they are not the same as each other!
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journeyman
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journeyman
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I find it interesting that there are many regional variations that surround the schwa. But intrusive "R's" make me crazy. I used to live in Washington DC. There is something that happens to people who have been there a long time. People gradually add the letter "R" after the "a" so people are pronouncing it Warsh-ing-ton. Just listen to american television commentators who are based there.
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