English Language & Usage Asked on December 8, 2020
In a similar question which asks the difference between /ə/ and /ʌ/, I learned that /ʌ/ occurs in stressed syllables. Now there is another similar vowel sound: /ɐ/ which also occurs in stressed syllables.
I don’t know the difference between /ɐ/ and [ɐ] yet but I am only concerned about the sounds they give whether it is "[ɐ] and [ʌ]" or "/ɐ/ and /ʌ/"
In wikipedia, [ɐ] is given in many varieties of English like California, Cockney, East Anglia, New Zealand, Received pronunciation and some other Englishes. As an example in Received Pronunciation, the example given in wikipedia is "nut" and transcription: "[nɐʔt]" whereas an example of [ʌ] is "gut" transcription: "[ɡʌt]".
I would expect both "gut" and "nut" to have the same vowel but I don’t know which vowel they have. Assuming that wikipedia is not so reliable, I consulted Cambridge dictionary which gives /ʌ/ for both "gut" and "nut".
One of my friends told me that the pronunciation of the word "cut" as given in the Cambridge Online Dictionary uses [ɐ] but when I hear both [ʌ] and [ɐ], they sound the same to me.
The name of /ɐ/ is Near-open central vowel and /ʌ/ is Open-mid back unrounded vowel but is there any difference between both of them? Which one does standard Englishes use? And how do you perceive the difference?
I need to know the difference between ɐ and ʌ (I am not concerned about the brackets). Can anyone enlighten me on this please?
Either [ɐ] or [ʌ] is possible: there is not a contrast, and there is not a specific quality that must be used in standard English. (The concept of "standard" is very unclear as applied to pronunciation, actually.) Since it is one phoneme, it should be transcribed in a phonemic transcription with one symbol, but you can choose whether you want that symbol to be /ɐ/, /ʌ/, or even /ə/ (if you are transcribing an accent where there is not a contrast between /ɐ~ʌ/ and /ə/).
The IPA defines [ʌ] as an open-mid back vowel, and [ɐ] as a near-open central vowel. These refer to the position of "reference vowels" which are located in a continuous "vowel space": there are similar vowels with slightly more or less degrees of front/back-ness or open/close-ness. Very often in English, the same vowel phoneme can be realized with different levels of frontness depending on the speaker, or depending on the context. For example, I am fairly certain that I use a back vowel in words like gull or hull: in my accent, syllable-final /l/ is a "dark l" that has a backing effect on the preceding vowel. I think it's possible that I use a less back vowel, maybe closer to /ɐ/, in a word like shun.
Since they do not contrast, English speakers will generally not hear any difference. You would need to go through phonetic training or use speech analysis software such as Praat to determine whether the vowel in a particular utterance is phonetically closer to IPA [ɐ] or [ʌ], or some third option (like an open-mid central vowel [ɜ] or near-open back vowel [ʌ̞]). Since the symbols of the IPA have an arbitrary/conventional relationship to the sounds, different linguists draw the boundaries between IPA letters in different places.
Correct answer by herisson on December 8, 2020
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