John Cowan wrote:

> Italian uses [A] rather than [a]? I'm surprised.

Oops! No, I'm afraid I swapped the two IPA [a]'s.

_ Marco
(who will now sit down and listen 100 times the relevant audio files in
http://hctv.humnet.ucla.edu/departments/linguistics/VowelsandConsonants/cour
se/chapter1/vowels.html)