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leeroy
Joined: 30 Jan 2003
Posts: 777
Location: London UK
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 Posted: Wed Oct 13, 2004 7:37 am Post subject: "cool" |
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I had a dream about this - this is weird... 
What, phonetically speaking, is the vowel sound in "cool"? I don't have a dictionary to hand, but it's not "put" and it's not "blue" either. |
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dmb
Joined: 12 Feb 2003
Posts: 8397
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| Posted: Wed Oct 13, 2004 7:44 am Post subject: |
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| /ku:l/ |
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Gordon
Joined: 28 Jan 2003
Posts: 5309
Location: Japan
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| Posted: Wed Oct 13, 2004 7:45 am Post subject: |
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| It is /u/, like boot or blue or too. Maybe you pronounce it differently than I do though. |
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anton
Joined: 07 Jul 2004
Posts: 46
Location: Taianan, Taiwan
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| Posted: Wed Oct 13, 2004 8:54 am Post subject: |
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| gordon are you scottish? |
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yaramaz
Joined: 05 Mar 2003
Posts: 2384
Location: Not where I was before
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| Posted: Wed Oct 13, 2004 9:21 am Post subject: |
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| Nay, canuck. I say it that way too. I think we are both from the Vancouver area. Could be regional or possibly delusional. |
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dmb
Joined: 12 Feb 2003
Posts: 8397
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| Posted: Wed Oct 13, 2004 9:36 am Post subject: |
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| � u� I tried to copy and paste it from the IPA. look what came up. Does that mean the Dave can't cope with phonetics? |
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Stephen Jones
Joined: 21 Feb 2003
Posts: 4124
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| Posted: Wed Oct 13, 2004 9:55 am Post subject: |
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| I am very surprised that any so-called teacher of English would ever claim it was 'u', i.e., the same as in 'blue' (!) |
The American Heritage Dictionary gives the phoneme as the same for 'blue' and 'cool'. It doesn't use the phonetic alpahbet but the symbol it uses is the equivalent of u: which is what Gordon and dmb say. Many people would pronounce it as a dipthong, with a somewhat shorter form of the u: being followed by a schwa, which I suspect is how Leeroy pronounces it.
Incidentally to display the phonetic alphabet in your browser you will firstly need the appropriate font installed, and secondly have the encoding set to Unicode, since no version of ANSII appears to work. |
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foss
Joined: 17 Aug 2004
Posts: 55
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| Posted: Wed Oct 13, 2004 11:14 am Post subject: |
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| If you are from London (or other areas of SE England) you might vocalize the "l" at the end of syllables so that it sounds similar to a /w/, which affects the preceding vowels. It's one of the features of Estuary English rather than Received Standard English so you have to bear that in mind in class. |
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dmb
Joined: 12 Feb 2003
Posts: 8397
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| Posted: Wed Oct 13, 2004 11:46 am Post subject: |
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| Stephen, I have the phonmap by jan Mulder on my desk top. I have used it successfully on word documents but I can't use it on this forum. Can You give an idiot proof guide so that i am able to do so. |
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leeroy
Joined: 30 Jan 2003
Posts: 777
Location: London UK
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| Posted: Wed Oct 13, 2004 3:56 pm Post subject: |
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I am indeed from London - so my /l/s sometimes come across as /w/s
("milk" sometimes = /miwk/)
But getting back to the /ku:l/ (as with "pool" and "school"), I am uncomfortable with it simply sounding like "blue" (/blu:/). It doesn't! At least certainly the way I say it... If I access my mental "Scots" recordings, though, I do recall that sometimes they tend to elongate vowels to the point that I (as an Estuary English speaker) wouldn't.
"cool" is longer than "pull", but (I suspect) it is the same sound phonetically speaking. So, I'd define it as as the horse-shoe thing with a colon on the end... |
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Dr.J
Joined: 09 May 2003
Posts: 304
Location: usually Japan
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| Posted: Thu Oct 14, 2004 12:10 am Post subject: |
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Maybe you are just think of the extra sound that occurs because of the final "L"
Blue is like "BLOO"
but cool becomes "COO UL" naturally because of the transition from the oo to the L .
The sound in the middle is still the same though.
But if you say cool really fast it just becomes c(schwa)l. But it sounds like you are a surfer or something. |
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GambateBingBangBOOM
Joined: 04 Nov 2003
Posts: 2021
Location: Japan
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| Posted: Thu Oct 14, 2004 6:34 am Post subject: |
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| Quote: |
| Many people would pronounce it as a dipthong, with a somewhat shorter form of the u: being followed by a schwa |
That's how I pronounce it. From Toronto, Canada.
Some people do elongate the U before the schwa but a lot of that seems to be stress.
IMO the schwa just comes from the mouth closing and tongue moving forward when moving from the [U] to the [l] within the same syllable, and therefore does not necessarily have to be part of a transcription.
Whether I personally think of it as a dipthong or not depends on the speed at which the word is said. In very fast speech, to me it doesn't count as a dipthong but in more slow speech it does sound like one.
So the vowel could be the same as in blue [blu:] in that if you put an /l/ at the end of blue (ie blue-l, but said as one word) you get a very similar vowel cluster (the rounding on the U sound in "Blue" may be less to accomodate the schwa).
So an example might be:
gu ("goo") gul (like in English pronounciation of "Hangul") |
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dmb
Joined: 12 Feb 2003
Posts: 8397
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| Posted: Thu Oct 14, 2004 6:40 am Post subject: |
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'You've got the day off work' 'Cool' (/ku:l/)
'It's a cool(/kul/) day '
In isolation I would say a long vowel sound. However, as part of connected speech the vowel sound is shortened. |
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dmb
Joined: 12 Feb 2003
Posts: 8397
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| Posted: Thu Oct 14, 2004 7:37 am Post subject: |
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| Robert, you say that phonemes are an abstract concept. But isn't an allophone an audibly distinct variant of a phoneme? |
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dmb
Joined: 12 Feb 2003
Posts: 8397
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| Posted: Thu Oct 14, 2004 8:11 am Post subject: |
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| robert, I am confused when you say that phonemes are an abstract concept. a phoneme is the smallest distinct sound unit in a language. For example, the world tip realises three successive phonemes represented in spelling by the letters t, i and p. Is it abstract because we don't say them isolation? |
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