Re: more English orthography

Tom Wier wrote:

>> That basic point still stands, that I don't see how we could find an
>> underlying
>> pronunciation for the schwa in "comma."  It may be best to consider it a
>> phoneme.  I just don't know how to test that.
>
>In such a situation, I'd just do another "wug" test as you did before:  come
>up with a derivational morpheme, say, <t-ic> to get <commatic>*.  Now,
>how would most people pronounce it?  My native intuition says [k_h@m&rIk],
>where [r] is a voiced tap.
I agree with that intuition.  Is the judgement because the underlying vowel is
[&]?  Or is it based on an analogy with words like "traumatic" [tr\@m&rIk]?  I
couldn't say, but it is interesting that we both have it.

My point about wug tests is that I don't find them convincing.  A
pronunciation
will always be given, even if there can be no correct answer.  It seems to me
that this cannot be a reliable test of the underlying pronunciation.

Marcus