Re: The quality of a schwa
- From: "ranjit_mathews@xxxxxxxxx" <ranjit_mathews@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 12 Oct 2007 23:05:03 -0700
On Oct 12, 8:58 pm, mb <azyth...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Oct 12, 10:13 am, "ranjit_math...@xxxxxxxxx"
<ranjit_math...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
When it is necessary to give a schwa a distinct quality, how is it
determined what quality to give it? For example, a speech synthesizer
would presumably need to produce a schwa as a vowel with some quality
it decides on; it hardly seems possible for it to produce a vowel with
indistinct quality.
"Indistinct quality" vowels are defined and cataloged, aren't they,
like IPA 317 or 316 or also slightly lower. Depending on the language,
you have well-defined orthography for it, too, like the Turkish
dotless i or the Armenian It, etc. so calling it "schwa" regardless of
circumstance won't fly. As for the English so-called "schwa" of the
unstressed vowels, as a foreigner I can't call it that name because
the same phoneme is indistinct noise in one native mouth and crystal-
clear, well-defined short vowel in another.
...
restored vowels jars one's senses; when I hear a trisyllabic rendition
of Indra, it always has a closed schwa making it something like
[indI"r@] or at any rate, no more open than [inde"r@].
Strange that it should jar for you: I have no idea of Hindi (or any of
the area languages) but can hear speakers of it at my workplace insert
a very clear 317 in words like Chit317ra, -put317ra, etc. everyday.
It looks like I didn't express myself well enough.
317 is what I hear too. What I'm jarred by is seeing 317 spelt as <a>
rather than with a grapheme similar to <I>. The jarring example I gave
was <indara> which spelling erroneously suggests to the uninitiated
(non-Indian) reader that the first <a> is pronounced as 322 or 324.
Come to think of it, the 2nd <a> presents a problem too; a masculine
ending 322 ought to be distinguished from a feminine ending pronounced
as 324 where I'm from (although it's 305 elsewhere). So, I think there
ought to be 3 central vowel graphemes <I>, <@> and <a> rather than
have all of them written as <a>.
.
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