Re: Transcribing rhotics for ESL

From: Mxsmanic (mxsmanic_at_hotmail.com)
Date: 07/11/04 

Date: Sun, 11 Jul 2004 11:26:26 +0200

mb writes:

> How so? The phoneme includes everything from the alveolar trill of a
> big chunk of the countryside all the way to the Loire-Paris
> grasseyement, via the Eastern ghain, and includes the said uvular
> trill, too. Are any of them unrecognizable in words?

The phoneme, yes, but not the most standard allophone thereof, which is
not trilled.

Perhaps I've not made my context clear. I'm preparing charts to help me
teach English as a second language, mostly to French-speaking students.
The most efficient way to do this is to explain to them the basic sounds
(i.e., phonemes) of English, and show which of these sounds are
effectively identical in French, and which are different or new. I
don't need to distinguish between allophones in English or in French.
However, I do need to distinguish between phonemes in each language AND
between phonemes that are pronounced very differently across the two
languages (such as the 'r' sound). Additionally, I need to use the same
symbols for phonemes that are in fact the same.

So, I'm trying to find the best symbol for an English 'r'. The ordinary
lowercase r won't do, because it represents a trilled r as in Spanish,
and using this symbol could mislead Spanish speakers into believing that
their r will do for English (it will, in terms of comprehension, but it
has such a strong influence on accent that it's normal to correct it,
anyway). I'm using the upside-down lowercase r right now because it
represents an alveolar approximant, which seems pretty widespread. The
retroflex is probably even more widespread, but the symbol for it is a
lot more weird, and I don't want to put off students, and few of my
students would speak a language with an 'r' sound that conflicts with
this, and the alveolar version is an allophone, anyway.

Similar constraints apply for the French phonemes. I use the normal
small uppercase R mostly for convenience, although it represents a
trilled r that actually is not a common allophone in French today (the
upside-down uppercase r would be a better choice, for a uvular
fricative).

A major stumbling block has been the careless transcription used by many
English speakers. For example, 'e' is often used to transcribe the
vowel in "bed," even though that vowel is actually represented by the
backward-3 symbol. Monolingual Anglophones probably don't care and no
doubt chose this symbol for typographic simplicity, but it's a big
problem when you are teaching students who really use the vowel
represented by 'e' in speech (such as French students). You end up with
students pronouncing "bed" like "bade" because that's how the
transcription looks. So I'm using the correct symbol in both languages.

The two "i" sounds have a similar problem. For some inexplicable
reason, some transcribers think that putting two dots after "i" in
transcription changes the timbre of the vowel; but all they are really
doing is changing the length. So they end up using the same symbol for
"beat" and "bit," and this confuses students because there are two
_different_ vowels in those words. Here again, I use the correct
symbols ('i' for beat and a small uppercase 'I' for bit).

These are the problems I'm trying to resolve. I need consistency across
languages in my use of transcription, even though I don't need to
resolve allophones within a language. My solution right now, I think,
is to transcribe the most common allophone for each phoneme in each
language, rather than a more general and lax use of symbols just for
phonemic distinctions. This way the phonemes are well distinguished
across languages. 

-- 
Transpose hotmail and mxsmanic in my e-mail address to reach me directly.

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