Re: Literary phonetic alphabet

Peter T. Daniels wrote:
On Oct 8, 7:51 pm, "John Atkinson" <johna...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
[Whoops: I thought I sent this yesterday; I guess some of it is now
outdated, but here it is anyway:]



António Marques wrote:
Peter T. Daniels wrote:
On Oct 7, 2:18 pm, António Marques<m...@xxxxxxx> wrote:
Please, once and for all, what's the distinction supposed to be?
Mary /a/, marry, /&/, merry /E/, whatever their realisations are
(hopefully /&/ being somewhere between the other two), or
something else altogether?

(With /E/ being usually notated /e/, seeing as they're not in
opposition.)

Not /a/, obviously; that's "mar".

Mary is probably /eh/ in Smith-Trager.

That makes sense (thanks, Brian and Ruud); it's not a clear
3-phoneme distinction then, unless one counts /eh/ as a single
phoneme.

I would; and denote it (less economically but more descriptively) by
/E: / or /E@ /; it's no doubt to some extent a matter of personal
choice, but it seems pretty standard to consider diphthongs like
those in FACE, GOAT, PRICE, MOUTH, NEAR, SQUARE, POOR and CURE as
single phonemes in (nonrhotic) English.

So it's
much simpler than I thought. Otoh, the vowel in 'mar' doesn't seem
to appear in -aCy context... mar, mark, mart, but no *mary [marI],
or is there?

There is: <Marie> (when stressed on the first syllable, as it
usually is in Ireland and Australia -- don't know about the USA).

Another near-minimal quadruple: baring (your midriff)/barring (the
way)/bury/Barry

berry (leaving the other pronunciation of bury to be in your table)

Berry, of course, is better; I forgot there are dialects where bury isn't [bEri], which would confuse the issue.

furry (the pronunciation that doesn't rhyme with one of the bury ones)

Furry has the NURSE vowel (at least in nonrhotic SBrit), which we've so far avoided (appropriately I think).

so it's a sextuple

Is [E@ consonant I] in complementary distribution with [a
consonant not-I]?

No. However, it does seem that [E@consonant vowel] can only occur
if the consonant is [r]. Also, diachronically, [E@r-] usually < [ar
vowel], which no doubt is why [ar vowel] is unusual in monomorphemic
words, except for more-or-less recent borrowings.

an uncanny observation
a double whammy, in fact!
you're a real baddie
stick it in a baggie
with a cabbie

cf. cannibal, camera, badger, baguette (or Baggins), cabaret

Sorry, I don't get the point. All these have [&], not [E@], and _none_ of them have [r] (I assume we're interested in the first syllable of cabaret, not the second). Are you claiming that they have the Mary phoneme (/eh / in T-S), and not the marry phoneme (/& / in T-S, I presume), either in your dialect or more generally in non-mergerers? (I don't think you are, but I have no idea what you _are_ claiming.)

[...]

John.


.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Subtitutes for English /T/ and /D/
    ... Any case in which the vowel did not delete is a case in which the rule ... If the speakers are not articulating a vowel, ... when some phenomenon of interest is indistinguishable from the noise, ... which hard-encodes the sound change into the phoneme inventory is not ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: why cant the BBC
    ... and must not appear in a phonemic transcription. ... short vowels, normal practice is for the long vowel phonemes are ... rejects the level and entity of the phoneme entirely (and, IMHO, ... Possibly relevant distinctive features for them are long/short, ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: Phonemes
    ... I suggested that vowel length was a phoneme and he objected ... as a syllable feature rather than a segment feature (but it's easy ... languages as a supersegmental (I think it extends beyond syllables) ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: Phonemes
    ... >>> produce it as a back vowel, and which I perceive as the same phoneme. ... instead of they are indeed saying another word. ... > reflexes, especially with respect to vowels, while still perceiving ...
    (alt.usage.english)
  • Re: Literary phonetic alphabet
    ... Furry has the NURSE vowel, ... Are you claiming that they have the Mary phoneme (/eh / in ... have no idea what you _are_ claiming.) ... group are all /&/ in matching environments. ...
    (sci.lang)