Re: OT: Definitely Not YAEPT: English phoneme inventory?

On Fri, 18 Jul 2003, Nik Taylor wrote:

> Christophe Grandsire wrote:
> >
> > En réponse à Mark J. Reed :
> >
> > >How about "see her" vs. "singer"?   (In my 'lect, at least, the 'i'
> > >in "-ing" is [i], not [I]).
> >
> > Examples involving word breaks are always a bit weak for me ;))) .
Especially when the element in question is missing :) </bad humor>

> There are things like "reheat"/"singing" (can't think of any actual
> minimal pairs, but that's still both intervocalic), altho that's still a
> morphemic boundary.
And even if it weren't, it could be analysed as /ri.hi:t/ vs /sIh.Ih/. But
now we've got rid of one phoneme but we have to raise the status of
syllable breaks so I don't think it's any advantage...

\end{EPT}
\begin{SwedishPT} // What's this? Mixing badly-formed XML and LaTeX?

In Swedish, would it make se nse to say that syllable breaks were phonemic
and length of neither consonants nor vowels was? So a (hypothetical) word
like fori would be /fu.ri/ and forri would be /fur.i/? I'm probably
showing my  ignorance on the matter here though :) And the fact that I
don't know Swedish :)

--
Tristan                  <kesuari@...>

Yesterday I was a dog. Today I'm a dog. Tomorrow I'll probably still
be a dog. Sigh! There's so little hope for advancement.
                -- Snoopy

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