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by jdmichal 3281 days ago
I did transcribe it wrong; it's phonetically [ɒ] for me -- cot-caught is in effect.

Though this does give opportunity to point out that even phonemic transcriptions can have dialectal differences. There is no one phonemic transcription for English, as the different vowel mergers mean that minimal pairs differ between groups. This kind of variation tends not to happen as much with consonants as vowels, which make them much harder to transcribe even phonemically. But, for example, here's a list of mergers for non-rhotic dialects:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhoticity_in_English#Mergers_c...

1 comments

There is also a liiiiitle difference between RP's and SA's [i] and [ɪ] (IPA sounds are "areas", not "points"), as well as a difference in tenseness (British is generally more tense).

So yeah, IPA doesn't completely specify how things sound.