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

On Wed, Jul 16, 2003 at 04:11:21PM -0400, Roger Mills wrote:
> Here's the system used in "classical" US phonemics of the 30s-50s.
> I've added the usual symbol after your X-SAMPA (hope the formatting
> survives!)
Thanks!  It looks mostly like the usual Americanist variant of the IPA.
Some things that caught my eye were the use of "long" vowel symbols
for short vowels (/e/ rather than epsilon for short <e>, /i/ rather than
small-cap i for short <i>, etc.) and the use of consonants instead of vowels
for dipththongs (/ey/ = IPA /ej/ for long <a>, /aw/ for <ow>, etc.).

> > \ä\ as o in mop                         /A/              a
Is that script a/alpha (ɑ, X-SAMPA /A/) or Roman a (X-SAMPA /a/)?

> The "^" of course are haceks/carons.
Otherwise known as "backspace, roll the paper down a tick, and type a v".
There were one or two things that were easier with typewriters.  Not
enough to make it worthwhile to go back to using them, of course. :)

> > \r\     /r\/
Did they actually use the turned r (ɹ, IPA equivalent of X-SAMPA /r\/), or just
the regular right-side up one that stands for a trilled R in IPA?

> Right.  Some included a 40th-- the odd triphthong /yuw/ as in "beauty"
> /byuwtiy/; others classed the Cy- as a cluster (of anomalous occurence, only
> before /uw/ in native Engl. words-- one wanted to exclude Cw/Cy from the
> possible clusters since they only occured in loans, and not many at that.)
Huh.  Never would have thought to class that as a separate phoneme.

> If you can find a 50s-60s edition of H.A.Gleason's introductory textbook, it
> gives a good run-down.  Ditto for C. F.. Hockett's "Course in Modern
> Linguistics" (slightly different approach than Gleason's, wouldn't you
> know...!)
¡Claro que sí!

> There were other ways of describing the vowels, mainly British systems,
> which called the tense vowels "long" and used a colon-- i: i  e: e u: u etc.
> Or else simply used the IPA symbols, comparable to the SAMPA-- i I e E
> Some also stayed with IPA j instead of /y/; I guess we Americans found that
> too European or something. Sufficiently confused?  More than you wanted to
> know?
I'm not confused, and it's very hard to tell me more than I want to know.
:)  I have Pullum and Laudusaw's _Phonetic_Symbol_Guide_, which aims to
be an encyclopedia of all the various symbols used by various people
at various times to represent speech sounds, so many of the Americanist
substitutions for the official IPA symbols are already familiar to me.
The /y/<->/j/ thing is confusing, though.  Americans being the stubborn lot
we are, we'll probably just bully the IPAssn into replacing /y/ with /ü/
and /j/ with /y/. :)

Thanks for the info!

-Mark

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