Just finished carving this year’s pump’in. [hæpi halowin]!

lostmymindinseoul:

I have been working on an essay test, for my linguistics class allllllll weekend and rushed home after work to keep plugging away at it. I’ve spent about 11 hours on it (and the rest of the weekend on a research paper for my other class), I’m only halfway done and I have no idea what I’m doing.  Right now I’m supposed to be explaining what the difference between the vowel sounds in “cat” and “can’t” are. The dictionary tells me that “cat” is [kæt] and “can’t” is [kɑːnt], so I was going to say that the vowel in “cat” is a diphthong (totally not a diphthong, my textbook is super confusing) and the one in “can’t” isn’t, but I have NEVER heard anyone pronounce can’t [kɑːnt]. And I went through the whole vowel chart and I couldn’t find one that WOULD accurately describe the way I say “can’t.” I’m guessing he wants me to say it’s the same vowel sound as cat, but that some weird rule means it is an æ but that it’s nasalized or something because it’s in a syllable containing a nasal consonant? I’m not sure though because they don’t even sound like the same vowel sound at all when I say them! I am so stressed out, this course is going to ruin my hopes of graduating summa cum laude.

Like some other comments have suggested, the [kɑːnt] version is typical of certain accents/dialects, but not of mainstream/standard US English. If your program is at an American school, it’s most likely that your teacher is assuming a [kæ̃nt] or [kæ̃t] pronunciation. If you have time before this is due, though, you might go to your teacher and express your frustration with not knowing which dialect of English you should be basing your answers on.

For mainstream US English, the “weird rule” is pretty simple. Nasal consonants are pronounced by diverting your air flow so it comes out through your nose instead of out your mouth. This is done by stopping the air flow somewhere in the mouth and lowering your velum so that air can escape into the nasal cavity. However, the velum actually starts lowering before the stop is formed in the mouth, and as a result the preceding vowel sounds are pronounced with some air escaping through the lowered velum and out the nasal cavity. These vowels are described as nasalized vowels, and they are indicated in IPA with a diacritic over the vowel symbol: [æ̃], in this case.

So… you’re perfectly right that the vowels in MUSE pronunciations of “cat” and “can’t” don’t sound the same. What your teacher appears to be getting at, though, is that the vowel in “can’t” would be the vowel in “cat” were it not for the airflow partially escaping out the lowered velum and distorting the sound, making it more nasally.

Hope this helps!

josephlinguaphile asked: hi again!!! i have a question regarding phonetics. what is the relationship of phones, allophones and phonemes?

Hello! Basically, a phone is any sound in a language. A phoneme is the set of sounds that the language’s speakers think of as being the same. Some phonemes are made up of only one phone, and some phonemes are made up of multiple phones. This depends on the language, though: two phones that belong to separate phonemes in one language might be grouped in the same phoneme in another language. And all the phones that belong to a certain phoneme are referred to as the allophones of that phoneme.

To give an example in English, we pronounce the sound “p” differently at the beginning and the end of a word. When you say “pot,” you pronounce the “p” with a tiny puff of air after it. But when you say “top,” your lips close at the end of the sound. These two sounds are different phones, but they’re allophones of the same phoneme in English. There’s a regular rule for determining which one gets pronounced when, and speakers don’t think of them as being different sounds. But again, another language might treat them that way.

Hope this helps!