Re: This week on Dancing with the Stars Re: The Business Memoir - the ``whom'' question


Ruud Harmsen wrote:
27 Oct 2006 14:52:23 -0700: "Peter T. Daniels"
<grammatim@xxxxxxxxxxx>: in sci.lang:

The only occurence of [&] I found is in American English [k<h>&~nt].

So what do (most/some/all) Americans use in words like bad, bat, had,
hat?

Respectively, Mary marry marry marry

That doesn't tell me anything if I do not know how these sound. What's
that in IPA? Fully front open/low vowels?

For the seven gazillionth time, I do not know a phonetic notation for
Mary, and obviously you don't understand the [&] of marry the way I, my
teachers, and Ladefoged do, so what good would using IPA do?

Yes, that's a problem, they are all different. Everybody's voice and
oral cavities are different. Yet, we understand all those who speak a
familiar language. It's a miracle, come to think about it. It really
is.

So a Dutch amateur who recently claimed never to have had a course in
phonetics is telling us that he's right and every eminent phonetician
(Jones, Ladefoged, Wells) is wrong?

Yes.

Whom should we believe?

Me. I'm dealing with this since about 1972, I can read and listen, I
can conciously put my own speech organs in certain positions, and I am
not stupid.

(Jones, Ladefoged, Wells)

BTW, these three contradict each other on this issue, so who should we
believe?

L and W seem to have been J's students at just about the same time (I
didn't realize John Wells is the same age as Peter Ladefoged, but I
recently saw an assertion that he's 82). It's more likely that they
don't disagree, but that you have misinterpreted something.

And it's not a miracle, it's phonemics.

We are talking about phonetics here, not phonemics. I already admitted
that in phonemics/phonology (and I incorrectly consider these two
identical), there ARE still a few things I should know but don't.

Phonemics is the American word, phonology the British word, for the
same thing.

What people perceive as "same" or "different" is phonemics. Believe me,
no nonlinguist Chicago native could hear the difference between my
"can" and "can" (with Mary and marry respectively), They use Mary for
both.

.