Re: more English orthography

On Sat, 13 May 2000 04:28:42 -0400, Muke Tever <alrivera@...>
wrote:

>I still don't see how this follows.
>
>OK.  My dialect, _phonemically_, has the vowels of:
>
>  bot, bait, bat, bet, beet, bit, bite, but, boat, book, boy, bout, boot,
>beaut, -ble, Bert
>
>It also has an 'o' that I think of as different though it only appears
>before r or in foreign words:  bore. (Phonemically doesn't conflict with
>"boat" AFAICT)
>
>I also have the consonants of:
>
>  bee, chew, do, though, fee, go, hi, jaw, key, low, me, no, -ing, pie, ray,
>sea, she, tea, thick, vow, way, you, zee, and "zh".
>
>How many on this list, (with American accents/dialects) does this _not_ map
>to their phoneme inventory?  (I make _no_ prescription to the phonetic
>values of these sounds.)
In my dialect, "bought" is distinct from "bot". Actually, I should say that
"caught" [kQt] is distinct from "cot" [kAt], since I really don't know the
correct pronunciation of "bot" (I've assumed that it rhymes with "cot". I
suppose you'd have to ask an entomologist.)

(This vowel is also unlike the vowel in "bore", although I don't know of
any minimal pairs. The closest I can get to a minimal pair is "sorry"
[sQri] vs. "story" [stOri].)

>Are there too many sounds?  Not enough?  Which ones are missing/extra?
Even with the same sounds, there are differences between dialects. Some
American dialects distinguish words that I don't (merry, marry, Mary), and
others make fewer distinctions (pin = pen).