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According to all English vowel chart, there is only one short i sound, so, it is the same sound in posItion and in rosEs, in the accents without the weak merger ? Thanks

tchrist
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pretuiol
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  • I sense a slight difference in those two sounds, though not enough to be noticed unless you're listening for it. – Hot Licks Jul 12 '15 at 00:18
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    I don't know what "the weak merger is", but the unstressed vowel of "roses" can also be schwa or backed from lax i, and is sometimes transcribed with barred-i. I don't think there is a lot of agreement about the exact quality of English unstressed vowels. – Greg Lee Jul 12 '15 at 00:51
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    The /ɪ/ is stressed in position and unstressed in roses. This means these two vowels are going to be pronounced differently (at least slightly) in many dialects of English. But if we tried to use a different IPA symbol for all the stressed/unstressed pairs of vowels, we might run out of symbols. And there's no reason to ... there are no minimal pairs because the stress is different. And the sounds are quite similar in most dialects. – Peter Shor Jul 12 '15 at 02:00
  • Related. – tchrist Feb 13 '23 at 03:42

1 Answers1

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The quality of the KIT vowel in position and roses (for speakers who use a KIT vowel in such plurals) is likely to be slightly different, at least in terms of length. However, it is the same phoneme in both words for such speakers. The two phonetic vowels which might occur in each word would be allophones of the same phoneme. So such speakers would recognise the vowels in position and roses as being the same vowel, namely the KIT vowel:

  • pəzɪʃn
  • rəʊzɪz
Araucaria - Him
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