English O: What's the difference from English A?

The pronunciation of {o:} is that the mouth is O-shaped and makes a sound of "Oh".

The pronunciation of {a} is to open your mouth wide and make an "ah" sound.

2. The pronunciation time is different.

{o:} is a long sound, so it is necessary to lengthen the sound time;

{a} This is a short tone, so there is no need to extend the sounding time.

Extended data:

The International Phonetic Alphabet was created by British and French scholars, which is mainly applicable to the annotation of Indo-European languages, African languages and some minority languages. After its publication, it became popular in European linguistics. Most Americans still use their own spelling and American Indian symbols.

There are only eight tone symbols in the International Phonetic Alphabet List, which are divided into two tones: Gao Diping, Ascending and Descending and Bump, which is not enough to study and describe tonal language.

Zhao Yuanren put forward the "fifth tone symbol" of tone, which is called "tone letter" and published it in Phonetics Teacher 1930. It is applicable to all tonal language and has been adopted by most international scholars. The four tones of Putonghua are ā, á, m 4 and à, which become common sense. International phonetic symbols are distinguished from ordinary letters by brackets [].

In addition, for the convenience of recording, the International Phonetic Society has also stipulated a set of "descriptive symbols", "contemporary symbols" and "special symbols" for some important phonetic accompanying phenomena.

Baidu encyclopedia-phonetic symbol