Re: What are the Sampa representations for various |r|s?

On Thu, 4 Nov 2004 00:06:43 -0500, Roger Mills <rfmilly@...> wrote:
> Jonathyn Bet'nct wrote:
>
> >
> > BTW, what's the difference between, say, /r/ and [r]?
> >
> /r/ (note the slashes) is phonemic, that is, it represents a contrastive
> sound in the phonological system of a given language.  [r] (note
> sq.brackets) is the phonetic representation of a specific sound, in this
> case the trilled [r] of e.g. Spanish, Italian.
Also, since phonemes only make sense in the context of a given
language, characters in /slashes/ can be a bit more ad-hoc, whereas
characters in [brackets] (IME) usually follow a specific system such
as IPA or an ASCII-friendly variant thereof.

Specifically, phonemic notation often simplifies as much as possible,
e.g. using /r/ for a language even if [r] is not a realisation of that
phoneme, rather than, say, /r\/ which would need extra characters.

Or it may use an even more non-IPA style; for example, Trager-Smith
for English, which uses things such as /i/ for [I] and /iy/ for [i],
or (IIRC) /j/ for [dZ]. (I remember I used to get barked at by PTD
over in sci.lang if I used something like /dZ/ for phonemicising
English.)

Cheers,
--
Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>
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