I draw this diagram from a phonetic book/British pronuciation/
But the symbols which were underlined by yellow color ,I do not think that they are phonetic symbols because we have only
/æ / as in cat
/ʌ / as in cut
/ɜ:/ as in turn
And we have not ɑ and ɜ
Also the/ ɜ/ / ɔ/ should be with colon
So I am very confused
Last edited by symaa; 11-May-2011 at 11:44.
Do not you see the picture?
/ɛ/ is the vowel of bed.
/ɑ/ is the first vowel of father.
The ː, that looks like a colon, means that the vowel is long. In British English there's usually /ɜː/ and /ɔː/, but it's not necessary to add ː because what matters is the vowel itself, since the length can vary by person.
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Don't be worried by this, symaa. The IPA system specifies and represents many more sounds than are needed for a language student's needs. There is a convention by which - for ease of typing, the symbol [ɛ] is represented by /e/, because English has no [e] vs [ɛ] distinction, so for phonemic transcription the more familiar symbol is often used; the same goes for [ɑ] vs [a].
b
In IPA, the correct vowel of bed is /ɛ/. Your book might use /e/ to make things easier.
/ɑ/ and /ɑː/ are the same vowel. The ː just means that the vowel is longer. Such a symbol is omitted in IPA charts.
Thank you, but to be honest I am very confused if
To be perfectly honest my teacher said that ɑ as in bat ,but when I looked for the transcription of the word I found that the transcription of bat is /bæt/
So, I cannot distinguish between the two vowels, so how can they have the same pronunciation ,because æ is font vowel and in the other side ɑ is a back vowel,moreover I never find a word transcribed with ɑ
All the best
Thank you again my teacher