Episode 15: trap, bath & palm

We're starting Season Two off with a bang! After a season away (i.e. summer), we're diving into the vowels found in the three lexical sets known as trap, bath & palm. The vowels associated with these sets, frequently /æ/, /a/ and /ɑ/, are explored fairly briefly... ok briefly FOR US... and we set ourselves up to dig deeper in Episode 16.

Show Notes:
Lexical Sets are:       categories of words that tend to share the same vowel quality.
                                    …and we can go into greater detail than that, of course.
 
Phonetic Landscape:
Before we get into these particular sets and how they’re realized in various accents, let’s look at the sounds themselves
 
ɑ        Open back unrounded vowel
the most cupped (open)  back position for the tongue. Some would say the most open jaw position. Some would also say that there is, necessarily a retraction of the tongue root.

a        Open front unrounded vowel
            the most cupped (open) front tongue position.
           
æ       Near-open front unrounded vowel
            halfway between ɛ and a
 
 short and checked*  [this is a phonological observation..]
*æ can be unchecked in Jalapa Mazatec and Vietnamese    http://hctv.humnet.ucla.edu/departments/linguistics/VowelsandConsonants/vowels/chapter12/mazatec.html
 
 
PHONETIC NOTATION:
 
ɑ        script (cursive) a            (single story lowercase)
a        print or type a             (double story lowercase)
æ       ash/asc             (a - e digraph)
 
 
HISTORY of SPELLING: 
 
Wikipedia has some very interesting stuff on the letter's history and development. 
What’s interesting is that this symbol originated to describe the glottal stop and came to represent, over time, the open vowel that followed.