The American sound is traditionally represented as /oʊ/, but that’s really a shorthand. I don’t think that very many Americans actually put any kind of a clear /o/ in there. As I said before, a substantial range of accents makes it a triphthong in which /o/ is not present. In some of the Upper Midwest accents, it appears as a non-dipthong, but it’s raised; it’s not the cardinal vowel /o/. The only accents I can think of that seem to have anything close to a cardinal /o/ are some of the stronger New England accents.
If you got a bunch of audio tapes of people speaking different languages, and tried listening to each one forward and backward, and the forward and backward versions sound pretty similar, then that would mean you could find out what your own language sounds like by listening to a backward recording of it.
I haven’t tried this - for one thing, I don’t have a recorder that could do that.
I remember Nava, a Spanish native, said on one of these earlier occasions that she found it difficult if not impossible to dinstinguish English from Dutch (and mayby also German) before she knew any of those languages.
Just over a second, but I’m told Southerners speak slower as a rule. Maybe the rule means that we hit our stresses at a slower pace.
I can see that. I’m a native English speaker and Dutch is the one language that, if I hear it in the background, I’ll mistake for English chatter, albeit slightly more guttural. (Perhaps I’d have the same reaction to Frisian, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard Frisian before.) I don’t get the same reaction from German, though. That doesn’t seem to have quite the same cadence and rhythm.
I get results similar to those of the person you’re responding to.
I’m from the DFW area.
I know plenty about music theory, having taken two years of music theory in High School, and having started out as a music major in college.
-FrL-
Correct. I was using the wrong terms.