The
three diagrams in figure 6.4 show that the tongue in the production of the
vowels in the words pit [pɪt] and put [pʊt] is very high in the mouth; but in
pit it is the front part of the tongue that is raised, and in put it is the
back part of the tongue. (Prolong the vowels of these words and try to feel
tongue rise.)
To produce the vowel sound of putt [pʌt] or ah [a],
the whole tongue is lowered. (The reason a doctor examining your throat may ask
you to say ‘ah’ is that the tongue is low and easy to see over.) Since the
whole of the tongue is lowered and flattened, this vowel is neither a front nor
a back vowel.
These three vowels show that Australian English vowels
can be dscribed in term of their height, and their fronting.
Some
vowel are neither high nor low; that is, they are mid vowels. For instance, to
produce the vowel in pet [pet], the tongue is raised to a mid-position between
the vowels for pit and putt. Similarly, some vowels such as [ʌ] are
neither front nor back; that is, they are cental vowels. For instance, the
vowel of boot [but] is a high vowel mid-way between the front vowel of pit and
the back vowel of put [pʊt]. The vowel [ə] that begins the word about [əbaʊt]
and ends the word sofa [soʊfə] is a mid-cental vowel. Because it is neither
front nor back, neither high nor low, it is often called the neural or
indeterminate vowel. Using these dimensions of the tongue front to back, high
to low we can classify some of the vowels that occur in English as in figure
6.5.
