I just bought the D. Appleton-Century Co. New Century Dictionary of 1944. It comes in two volumes and certainly has the prettiest covers of all of my dictionaries so far, with embossed borders
The phonemic transcriptions of industry and industrial in the M-W dictionary suggests that the u is pronounced the same in both words: \ˈin-(ˌ)də-strē\ and \in-ˈdə-strē-əl\ both have a schwa following the \d\. This is rather strange.
Do you pronounce them the same? I think the stressed vowel in industrial is not a schwa.
And is there no difference between the vowels in mother? M-W and ODO suggest that the only difference is the stress: \ˈmə-thər\, which, again, I find a bit surprising.
Hm, so perhaps the problem is that I misunderstood what the term term means.
However, I guess I can leave the retagging (if needed) to the regulars now that it has been discussed in chat. (If I edited it, it would need to go through suggested edit review, so I would have to bother one or two reviewers with that.)
@Færd but they are very close, and there's lots out there on schwa and low back vowels. stressed vs unstressed. I have a hard time explaining the difference (if there is any in either production or perception)
@Færd This doesn't apply to everyone, but for me, I think the vowel in "industry" is higher than the vowel in "industrial". It's like [ə] vs. [ɐ]. I have some form of the weak vowel merger, so for me non-final schwa and /ɪ/ are more or less neutralized. But word final "schwa" (in words like "comma" and so on, and also in plural forms like "commas") is [ɐ]. Also, stressed schwa doesn't exist in my phonemic inventory, so the stressed forms of words like "just", "of", "was", "what" have [ɐ].
After thinking about it a bit more, I think "a" seems more like it has [ɐ] than other weak forms because the vowel is word-initial. It seems that, in addition to my sense that a stressed vowel cannot be realized as [ə], I have a tendency to not identify vowels as [ə] when they come either at the start or the end of a word. That said, although "amoral" and "immoral" seem to have a slight but definite difference for me, "except" and "accept" and "affect" and "effect" are more iffy.
So I think I might use [ə] word-intially (and possibly word-finally) more often than I realize.
@sumelic Damn. Had you asked me a minute ago, I would have told you that I pronounce effect completely different from affect and the same for except and accept. You made me realize that actually, I don't. They're probably different but certainly similar.
Huh. Cool, I love it when I find out things about the way I speak I wasn't even aware of :)