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

Ian Spackman wrote:
> You don't consider loch an English word?  (To take the most obvious
example.)

For most American speakers, "loch" is probably a regionalism (i.e.
Scottish), and the vast majority of us pronounce it with /-k/, just as we do
J.S.Bach, and supersonic speed Mach...  Those who pronounce these words
correctly are doing so because they're educated, or actually have some
familiarity with the field in question. So it's a question of register.
Similarly, Indonesian speakers who are educated, and who took their Koran or
foreign language studies seriously, have no trouble with /f S x v z/ etc but
the average speaker mangles them.  They're phonemic (and clearly borrowed)
for only a small segment of the population.
>
> My understanding was that this was an attempt at a phoneme list for all
> English dialects.
Certainly not my intention-- the M-W guide clearly related only to
"standard" US pronunciation, likewise my listing of the phonemes, vintage 50
years ago.

Whether it's possible to set up a list of phonemes from which _all_ English
dialects can be derived is another question.   I think it might work for
general US and general RP (the main problem is /r/), but as Tristan's data
from time to time show, probably not for Australian-- there've been too many
changes there.  Which is why, of course, most Americans understand British
speech pretty well, but many (Brits too?) have difficulty understanding some
Aust. speech.