Re: BBC does it again

In article <1v7qccqfj657s$.lbdyzrn2umx6$.dlg@xxxxxxxxxx>,
"Brian M. Scott" <b.scott@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Fri, 13 Jun 2008 12:00:34 -0400, Harlan Messinger
<hmessinger.removethis@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
<news:6bfjt2F3bto8tU1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> in sci.lang:

John Atkinson wrote:

"Harlan Messinger" <hmessinger.removethis@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote in message news:6bcsnhF3akn8nU1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
...

[...]

I just commented on this in another note, but it's
relevant here so I'll reiterate it: One of the
advantages of underspecification is that you don't
restrict the scope of your phonemic model
unnecessarily. If you use /eI/ for English "long E",
then you're limiting the utility of your model to the
Englishes of speakers who have a diphthong there.
Sure, *technically* we can just as easily write /eI/ >
[e:] for those speakers as we could write /e:/ > [eI]
for the remaining speakers if we chose to use /e:/ to
represent long "E". But /eI/ marks the diphthong
explicitly. To me it seems to make more sense not to
mark a feature in the abstract representation that
*may* appear in the realization, than to mark one that
*may not*.

What do you mean by "long E"?

I mean what American primary school teachers--at least, my
teachers--call "long E", [...]

The 'long E' of the grade school teacher is the vowel of
<beet>. You were talking about the grade school teacher's
'long A', the vowel of <bait>.

I think some of the confusion here goes back to me getting it wrong
accidentally. I meant "long A", but wrote "long E".

Nathan

--
Nathan Sanders
Linguistics Program
Williams College
http://wso.williams.edu/~nsanders/
.

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