Re: Your first "linguistic" memory

John Atkinson wrote:

> >> is already intrinsically
> >> long, viz. [A:]. It may not be /A:/, it don't know that, but it
> >> certainly is [A:]. So no lengtening takes place due to /r/ being
> >> [empty], because the vowel is already long, and there is no place for
> >> superlong vowels in the system.
> >
> > Not in the system, of course (only in the Estonian system), but why not
> > phonetically?

("Father" vs. "farther")

> Eh? You're saying that both words have the same phoneme /A:/, but they may
> be different at the allophonic level, is that it? If there's no phonemic
> distinction in the vowel, and there's nothing different about the rest of
> each word, what is there to induce different allophones?

If the speakers think they're the same, then the difference isn't
phonemic.

Remember, the Southeast Asianist Shorto claimed that he could hear
morpheme boundaries in English; maybe he could!
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@xxxxxxx
.