Re: THEORY: Ray on ambisyllabicity

On Sat, 28 Oct 2000, Adrian Morgan wrote:

> I understand [U] to be the very rounded vowel as in _who are you_
> (hU a: jU); lips very constrained and pointing forward, back of tongue
> raised.
>
> I understand [u] to be one of a family of vowels related to the consonant
> [w] but with the lips a bit looser, e.g. _woof!_ [wuf].
Okay, based on this description, you definitely have them reversed.
[u] is the tenser vowel, and [U] the laxer one.

> I understand [o] to be a more poetic sound, the realisation of _oh_ in
> those dialects (e.g Irish English) in which the word is a vowel.
Yes.

> Whereas phonemic transcription captures only the sounds that actually
> play a part in communication, using the same symbol for two sounds that
> have identical 'information content' in the particular language. The
> symbol used in a phonemic transcription is, presumably, its most common
> phonetic realisation.
Typically.  But often the symbol chosen for phonemic transcription is
the phonetic realization *in a very different dialect*, as is the
case for Oz English.  So "book" is phonemically /bUk/ and "moon" is
phonemically /mun/ in every dialect (I think), but the phonetic
realizations can be quite different!

Phonetic transcription is conventional, in the sense that a particular
symbol is assigned arbitrarily to a particular sound.  But phonemic
transcription is doubly conventional, because a particular symbol is
chosen with only the loosest consideration for how that symbol
corresponds to a sound.

There is also a theory-driven component to phonemic transcription, of course.
In the fifties, works on American English phonology often used the
phonemic transcriptions /biyt/ for "beat" and /bit/ for "bit", which are
in IPA [bit] and [bIt] respectively.  I repeat, this is AmE: other
Englishes have other representations.  In this model, there was only
one phoneme /i/, which might be followed by the homorganic semivowel
phoneme /y/ (which by itself meant IPA [j], not [y], of course!)

Life's confusing when you talk funny.

--
John Cowan                                   cowan@ccil.org
One art/there is/no less/no more/All things/to do/with sparks/galore
        --Douglas Hofstadter