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

Roger Mills wrote:
> > So by my count that's 39 phonemes.
> 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
Well, and before /r=/ as in "pure", but those are presumably derived
from /ju/.  But, even in loan words, Cy- is often rendered as Ci.  I
usually hear, for example, /pi&no/ rather than */pj&no/

In fact, I'd go so far as to doubt that /j/ even *is* a phoneme in
English, but rather an allophone of /i/, despite native intuition.  The
reason being that (at least in my idiolect - I don't *think* I've heard
anything different tho in other people) [j] can only occur a) between
vowels (and that very rarely), b) word-initially, or c) after a
consonant and before /u/.  On the other hand, [i] can never occur in
those situations.  I suspect the same may hold true for [u]-[w], but
haven't looked into that one.  The [i]-[j] symetry I first noticed when
I tried to figure out why I found Spanish words like _diccionario_ so
hard to pronounce correctly (I'd come up with [diksio'nario] rather than
[diksjo'narjo], sometimes I'd get [diksjo'nario], but [rj] was hard),
and I realized that [j] was probably not a distinct phoneme at all in
English.

> one wanted to exclude Cw/Cy from the
> possible clusters since they only occured in loans, and not many at that.)
Cw occurs in many native English words.  E.g., twin, queen, dwarf,
swine, thwart.  But, I think those might be the only native Cw
combinations.

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