Why is "æ" different?

Question

I searched in the dictionary,"man" is pronounced /mæn/ .But why is the vowel æ in the word "man" pronounced differently from the vowel æ in this video:  .  I have wondered about this for a long time.

Mister Micawber · Accepted Answer

By any individual speaker, man and hat are pronounced the same. There are regional and individual variations in the actual interpretation of æ, though. The vowel system must be viewed as a whole, with relative differences in the sounds.

KMagic · Answer

Do you mean that sometimes a vowel has a variation, then we will read it with difference ways? Because I don't really understand your answer. My English is not very good ^^ Could you give me an example?

AlpheccaStars · Answer

I think that Mr. M was telling you that people from different places speak with different accents.
Speaker A will pronounce the words man and hat the same way.
Speaker B will pronounce the words man and hat the same way.
But speaker A's pronunciation might be different from speaker B's.

The IPA chart is meant to depict sounds independent of language.
So the same passage will be transcribed differently, depending on the speaker's accent.
For example, here is a passage:
Please call Stella. Ask her to bring these things with her from the store: Six spoons of fresh snow peas, five thick slabs of blue cheese, and maybe a snack for her brother Bob. We also need a small plastic snake and a big toy frog for the kids. She can scoop these things into three red bags, and we will go meet her Wednesday at the train station.

Here is an IPA transcription of a Sicilian speaker reading the passage:
http://accent.gmu.edu/searchsaa.php?function=detail&speakerid=316

Here is an IPA transcription of a Chinese speaker reading the passage:
http://accent.gmu.edu/searchsaa.php?function=detail&speakerid=491

Raindoctor · Answer

British speakers tend to realize TRAP vowel as /a/ (Macmillan dictionary produces the sound /a/ and transcribes it as /æ/: Geoff Lindsey of English speech services shows this absurdity). However, Americans tend to realize it as /æ/. Even in certain American dialects, TRAP set is realized as higher than /æ/.

That's why don't trust transcriptions just because they are transcribed by native speakers. Then, there is a length issue before voiceless and voiced consonants.

One way to check these sounds is: a) master cardinal vowels; b) use a slowdowner to slow down that vowel sound, and repeat a couple of times, you can hear what is produced. Otherwise, your prior knowledge makes you mishear sounds.

The more you master articulatory phonetics, the more you distrust all these accent coaches' transcriptions and advice as well!

From quora's poster:
"the auditory cortex (a part of the higher brain responsible for recognizing phonemes) whittles away by around age 1 most phonemes that it doesn't hear on a regular basis.

To a Japanese speaker, the English "R" and "L" light up the same neurons, so the speaker literally cannot hear the difference between "rice" and "lice."

There have been studies (I should be able to find citations if I look) that demonstrate that concentrating very hard on slowed-down recordings of new phonemes allows even adults to learn to distinguish them. The slowing down is similar to how dyslexics are often treated; it slows the processing burden on the auditory processing system. This and the careful attention required are not things that average adult speakers typically encounter."

KMagic · Answer

To be honest, I don't really understand. So, please answer that is there a different between /æ/ and /a/ ?

Raindoctor · Answer

KMagicTo be honest, I don't really understand. So, please answer that is there a different between /æ/ and /a/ ?

Yes, there is a difference. Even there is a difference between Italian /a/ and the cardinal vowel four /a/.

Check http://englishspeechservices.com/blog/?p=3792

For more, do your homework and find right tools like slowdowner, learn cardinal vowels. You can become an expert on your own without all these confusions perpetuated by products of various TESOL certification boards!

Why is "æ" different?

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